Question

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Do try/catch blocks hurt performance when exceptions are not thrown?

Hey everyone,
Just a quick question about try..catch blocks. I’ve heard they’re expensive to use and shouldn’t be used as part of a program’s flow. However, in order to validate email addresses, I’m using the following code.

        try
        {
            MailAddress checkEmail = new MailAddress(testEmail);

            return true;
        }
        catch
        {
            return false;
        }

Due to prior validation, I don’t many exceptions to be caught unless it’s an attempt to bypass validation. My question is, are Try…Catch blocks only expensive if an exception is caught, or is it always expensive regardless of whether any exception is thrown?

Thanks

EDIT : Thanks for all the replies. I’ve decided that since the checking (in C#) isn’t very expensive, I’ll stick with this method. It’s mainly because an actual exception being thrown is rare since there are prior validation steps that ensure no one accidentally enters an invalid email address.

Answer 1

In general, in today’s implementations, entering a try block is not expensive at all (this was not always true). However, throwing and handling an exception is usually a relatively expensive operation. So, exceptions should normally be used for exceptional events, not normal flow control.

Performance is only one factor to consider, though, especially in the modern world. If (for instance) you’re doing something once in response to a user action, it probably doesn’t matter from a performance standpoint whether you use an exception even when you could have done a proactive check instead, provided the exception happens quickly enough the user isn’t jolted.¹ But if you’re doing something in a tight loop that’s going to run hundreds of thousands of times, or you’re writing a web application that may need to handle a huge load, you’d probably want to avoid using an exception for a normal case.

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¹ More than a decade ago I was responsible for enhancements to a .Net 1.1 “no touch deployment” application in which the first exception thrown took fully three seconds. This was a sufficient problem in one use case involving opening a file the user had asked for which might reasonably not be there that I had to add a check for file existence prior to trying to open the file, which is normally poor programming practice (just try to open the file and handle the exception if that fails), purely because the user experience waiting for that exception to get built was so poor. But that’s probably not the world we live in now.