What Are the Effects of Exceptions on Performance in Java

What are the effects of exceptions on performance in Java?

It depends how exceptions are implemented. The simplest way is using setjmp and longjmp. That means all registers of the CPU are written to the stack (which already takes some time) and possibly some other data needs to be created... all this already happens in the try statement. The throw statement needs to unwind the stack and restore the values of all registers (and possible other values in the VM). So try and throw are equally slow, and that is pretty slow, however if no exception is thrown, exiting the try block takes no time whatsoever in most cases (as everything is put on the stack which cleans up automatically if the method exists).

Sun and others recognized, that this is possibly suboptimal and of course VMs get faster and faster over the time. There is another way to implement exceptions, which makes try itself lightning fast (actually nothing happens for try at all in general - everything that needs to happen is already done when the class is loaded by the VM) and it makes throw not quite as slow. I don't know which JVM uses this new, better technique...

...but are you writing in Java so your code later on only runs on one JVM on one specific system? Since if it may ever run on any other platform or any other JVM version (possibly of any other vendor), who says they also use the fast implementation? The fast one is more complicated than the slow one and not easily possible on all systems. You want to stay portable? Then don't rely on exceptions being fast.

It also makes a big difference what you do within a try block. If you open a try block and never call any method from within this try block, the try block will be ultra fast, as the JIT can then actually treat a throw like a simple goto. It neither needs to save stack-state nor does it need to unwind the stack if an exception is thrown (it only needs to jump to the catch handlers). However, this is not what you usually do. Usually you open a try block and then call a method that might throw an exception, right? And even if you just use the try block within your method, what kind of method will this be, that does not call any other method? Will it just calculate a number? Then what for do you need exceptions? There are much more elegant ways to regulate program flow. For pretty much anything else but simple math, you will have to call an external method and this already destroys the advantage of a local try block.

See the following test code:

public class Test {
    int value;


    public int getValue() {
        return value;
    }

    public void reset() {
        value = 0;
    }

    // Calculates without exception
    public void method1(int i) {
        value = ((value + i) / i) << 1;
        // Will never be true
        if ((i & 0xFFFFFFF) == 1000000000) {
            System.out.println("You'll never see this!");
        }
    }

    // Could in theory throw one, but never will
    public void method2(int i) throws Exception {
        value = ((value + i) / i) << 1;
        // Will never be true
        if ((i & 0xFFFFFFF) == 1000000000) {
            throw new Exception();
        }
    }

    // This one will regularly throw one
    public void method3(int i) throws Exception {
        value = ((value + i) / i) << 1;
        // i & 1 is equally fast to calculate as i & 0xFFFFFFF; it is both
        // an AND operation between two integers. The size of the number plays
        // no role. AND on 32 BIT always ANDs all 32 bits
        if ((i & 0x1) == 1) {
            throw new Exception();
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int i;
        long l;
        Test t = new Test();

        l = System.currentTimeMillis();
        t.reset();
        for (i = 1; i < 100000000; i++) {
            t.method1(i);
        }
        l = System.currentTimeMillis() - l;
        System.out.println(
            "method1 took " + l + " ms, result was " + t.getValue()
        );

        l = System.currentTimeMillis();
        t.reset();
        for (i = 1; i < 100000000; i++) {
            try {
                t.method2(i);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                System.out.println("You'll never see this!");
            }
        }
        l = System.currentTimeMillis() - l;
        System.out.println(
            "method2 took " + l + " ms, result was " + t.getValue()
        );

        l = System.currentTimeMillis();
        t.reset();
        for (i = 1; i < 100000000; i++) {
            try {
                t.method3(i);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                // Do nothing here, as we will get here
            }
        }
        l = System.currentTimeMillis() - l;
        System.out.println(
            "method3 took " + l + " ms, result was " + t.getValue()
        );
    }
}

Result:

method1 took 972 ms, result was 2
method2 took 1003 ms, result was 2
method3 took 66716 ms, result was 2

The slowdown from the try block is too small to rule out confounding factors such as background processes. But the catch block killed everything and made it 66 times slower!

As I said, the result will not be that bad if you put try/catch and throw all within the same method (method3), but this is a special JIT optimization I would not rely upon. And even when using this optimization, the throw is still pretty slow. So I don't know what you are trying to do here, but there is definitely a better way of doing it than using try/catch/throw.

How expensive are Exceptions

I haven't bothered to read up on Exceptions but doing a very quick test with some modified code of yours I come to the conclusion that the Exception circumstance quite a lot slower than the boolean case.

I got the following results:

Exception:20891ms
Boolean:62ms

From this code:

public class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
            Test t = new Test();
            t.testException();
            t.testBoolean();
    }
    public void testException() {
            long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
            for(long i = 0; i <= 10000000L; ++i)
                    doSomethingException();
            System.out.println("Exception:" + (System.currentTimeMillis()-start) + "ms");
    }
    public void testBoolean() {
            long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
            for(long i = 0; i <= 10000000L; ++i)
                    doSomething();
            System.out.println("Boolean:" + (System.currentTimeMillis()-start) + "ms");
    }

    private void doSomethingException() {
        try {
          doSomethingElseException();
        } catch(DidNotWorkException e) {
           //Msg
        }
    }
    private void doSomethingElseException() throws DidNotWorkException {
       if(!isSoAndSo()) {
          throw new DidNotWorkException();
       }
    }
    private void doSomething() {
        if(!doSomethingElse())
            ;//Msg
    }
    private boolean doSomethingElse() {
       if(!isSoAndSo())
          return false;
       return true;
    }
    private boolean isSoAndSo() { return false; }
    public class DidNotWorkException extends Exception {}
}

I foolishly didn't read my code well enough and previously had a bug in it (how embarassing), if someone could triple check this code I'd very much appriciate it, just in case I'm going senile.

My specification is:

Compiled and run on 1.5.0_16
Sun JVM
WinXP SP3
Intel Centrino Duo T7200 (2.00Ghz, 977Mhz)
2.00 GB Ram

In my opinion you should notice that the non-exception methods don't give the log error in doSomethingElse but instead return a boolean so that the calling code can deal with a failure. If there are multiple areas in which this can fail then logging an error inside or throwing an Exception might be needed.

Which part of throwing an Exception is expensive?

Creating an exception object is not necessarily more expensive than creating other regular objects. The main cost is hidden in native fillInStackTrace method which walks through the call stack and collects all required information to build a stack trace: classes, method names, line numbers etc.

Most of Throwable constructors implicitly call fillInStackTrace. This is where the idea that creating exceptions is slow comes from. However, there is one constructor to create a Throwable without a stack trace. It allows you to make throwables that are very fast to instantiate. Another way to create lightweight exceptions is to override fillInStackTrace.

Now what about throwing an exception?

In fact, it depends on where a thrown exception is caught.

If it is caught in the same method (or, more precisely, in the same context, since the context can include several methods due to inlining), then throw is as fast and simple as goto (of course, after JIT compilation).

However if a catch block is somewhere deeper in the stack, then JVM needs to unwind the stack frames, and this can take significantly longer. It takes even longer, if there are synchronized blocks or methods involved, because unwinding implies releasing of monitors owned by removed stack frames.

I could confirm the above statements by proper benchmarks, but fortunately I don't need to do this, since all the aspects are already perfectly covered in the post of HotSpot's performance engineer Alexey Shipilev: The Exceptional Performance of Lil' Exception.

Comparing checked and unchecked exceptions (Performance, Benchmarks) in Java

From the perfomance point of view, building stack trace for exception is anyway the longest operation when an exception is generated (details).

Checked and unchecked exceptions make difference only at compile time. The Java compiler forces you to either catch checked exceptions or declare them in the method signature. It was supposed to improve program safety, but the majority opinion seems to be that it's not worth the design problems it creates.

There is even Lomboks "magical" @SneakyThrows annotation to overcome this compile-time check. On the JVM (class file) level, all exceptions, checked or not, can be thrown regardless of the throws clause of your methods, which is why this works.

Java catch exception design and performance

are they any performance issue with cover all my code with try/catch?

No. If no exceptions are thrown, the exception handling code is never run.

there is a better way to do design exception handling?

Don't catch Exception unless a method you call actually throws Exception. Catch specific checked exceptions, and RuntimeException if you want to be sure.

What Are the Effects of Exceptions on Performance in Java