Question

I just came across this seemingly innocuous comment, benchmarking ArrayList vs a raw String array. It’s from a couple years ago, but the OP writes

I did notice that using for String s: stringsList was about 50% slower than using an old-style for-loop to access the list. Go figure…

Nobody commented on it in the original post, and the test seemed a little dubious (too short to be accurate), but I nearly fell out of my chair when I read it. I’ve never benchmarked an enhanced loop against a “traditional” one, but I’m currently working on a project that does hundreds of millions of iterations over ArrayList instances using enhanced loops so this is a concern to me.

I’m going to do some benchmarking and post my findings here, but this is obviously a big concern to me. I could find precious little info online about relative performance, except for a couple offhand mentions that enhanced loops for ArrayLists do run a lot slower under Android.

Has anybody experienced this? Does such a performance gap still exist? I’ll post my findings here, but was very surprised to read it. I suspect that if this performance gap did exist, it has been fixed in more modern VM’s, but I guess now I’ll have to do some testing and confirm.

Update: I made some changes to my code, but was already suspecting what others here have already pointed out: sure the enhanced for loop is slower, but outside of very trivial tight loops, the cost should be a miniscule fraction of the cost of the logic of the loop. In my case, even though I’m iterating over very large lists of strings using enhanced loops, my logic inside the loop is complex enough that I couldn’t even measure a difference after switching to index-based loops.

TL;DR: enhanced loops are indeed slower than a traditional index-based loop over an arraylist; but for most applications the difference should be negligible.

Answer 1

The problem you have is that using an Iterator will be slower than using a direct lookup. On my machine the difference is about 0.13 ns per iteration. Using an array instead saves about 0.15 ns per iteration. This should be trivial in 99% of situations.

public static void main(String... args) {
    int testLength = 100 * 1000 * 1000;
    String[] stringArray = new String[testLength];
    Arrays.fill(stringArray, "a");
    List<String> stringList = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(stringArray));
    {
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        long total = 0;
        for (String str : stringArray) {
            total += str.length();
        }
        System.out.printf("The for each Array loop time was %.2f ns total=%d%n", (double) (System.nanoTime() - start) / testLength, total);
    }
    {
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        long total = 0;
        for (int i = 0, stringListSize = stringList.size(); i < stringListSize; i++) {
            String str = stringList.get(i);
            total += str.length();
        }
        System.out.printf("The for/get List loop time was %.2f ns total=%d%n", (double) (System.nanoTime() - start) / testLength, total);
    }
    {
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        long total = 0;
        for (String str : stringList) {
            total += str.length();
        }
        System.out.printf("The for each List loop time was %.2f ns total=%d%n", (double) (System.nanoTime() - start) / testLength, total);
    }
}

When run with one billion entries entries prints (using Java 6 update 26.)

The for each Array loop time was 0.76 ns total=1000000000
The for/get List loop time was 0.91 ns total=1000000000
The for each List loop time was 1.04 ns total=1000000000

When run with one billion entries entries prints (using OpenJDK 7.)

The for each Array loop time was 0.76 ns total=1000000000
The for/get List loop time was 0.91 ns total=1000000000
The for each List loop time was 1.04 ns total=1000000000

i.e. exactly the same. 😉