Question

What are the performance implications of throwing exceptions in C++0x? How much is this compiler dependent? This is not the same as asking what is the cost of entering a try block, even if no exception is thrown.

Should we expect to use exceptions more for general logic handling like in Java?

Answer 1

#include <iostream>
#include <stdexcept>

struct SpaceWaster {
    SpaceWaster(int l, SpaceWaster *p) : level(l), prev(p) {}
    // we want the destructor to do something
    ~SpaceWaster() { prev = 0; }
    bool checkLevel() { return level == 0; }
    int level;
    SpaceWaster *prev;
};

void thrower(SpaceWaster *current) {
    if (current->checkLevel()) throw std::logic_error("some error message goes here\n");
    SpaceWaster next(current->level - 1, current);
    // typical exception-using code doesn't need error return values
    thrower(&next);
    return;
}

int returner(SpaceWaster *current) {
    if (current->checkLevel()) return -1;
    SpaceWaster next(current->level - 1, current);
    // typical exception-free code requires that return values be handled
    if (returner(&next) == -1) return -1;
    return 0;
}

int main() {
    const int repeats = 1001;
    int returns = 0;
    SpaceWaster first(1000, 0);

    for (int i = 0; i < repeats; ++i) {
        #ifdef THROW
            try {
                thrower(&first);
            } catch (std::exception &e) {
                ++returns;
            }
        #else
            returner(&first);
            ++returns;
        #endif
    }
    #ifdef THROW
        std::cout << returns << " exceptions\n";
    #else
        std::cout << returns << " returns\n";
    #endif
}

Mickey Mouse benchmarking results:

$ make throw -B && time ./throw
g++     throw.cpp   -o throw
1001 returns

real    0m0.547s
user    0m0.421s
sys     0m0.046s

$ make throw CPPFLAGS=-DTHROW -B && time ./throw
g++  -DTHROW   throw.cpp   -o throw
1001 exceptions

real    0m2.047s
user    0m1.905s
sys     0m0.030s

So in this case, throwing an exception up 1000 stack levels, rather than returning normally, takes about 1.5ms. That includes entering the try block, which I believe on some systems is free at execution time, on others incurs a cost each time you enter try, and on others only incurs a cost each time you enter the function which contains the try. For a more likely 100 stack levels, I upped the repeats to 10k because everything was 10 times faster. So the exception cost 0.1ms.

For 10 000 stack levels, it was 18.7s vs 4.1s, so about 14ms additional cost for the exception. So for this example we’re looking at a pretty consistent overhead of 1.5us per level of stack (where each level is destructing one object).

Obviously C++0x doesn’t specify performance for exceptions (or anything else, other than big-O complexity for algorithms and data structures). I don’t think it changes exceptions in a way which will seriously impact many implementations, either positively or negatively.