I know that going into a catch block has some significance cost when executing a program, however, I was wondering if entering a try{} block also had any impact so I started looking for an answer in google with many opinions, but no benchmarking at all. Some answers I found were:
Java try/catch performance, is it recommended to keep what is inside the try clause to a minimum?
Try Catch Performance Java
Java try catch blocks
However they didn't answer my question with facts, so I decided to try it for myself.
Here's what I did. I have a csv file with this format:
host;ip;number;date;status;email;uid;name;lastname;promo_code;
where everything after status is optional and will not even have the corresponding ; , so when parsing a validation has to be done to see if the value is there, here's where the try/catch issue came to my mind.
The current code that in inherited in my company does this:
StringTokenizer st=new StringTokenizer(line,";");
String host = st.nextToken();
String ip = st.nextToken();
String number = st.nextToken();
String date = st.nextToken();
String status = st.nextToken();
String email = "";
try{
email = st.nextToken();
}catch(NoSuchElementException e){
email = "";
}
and it repeats what it's done for email with uid, name, lastname and promo_code.
and I changed everything to:
if(st.hasMoreTokens()){
email = st.nextToken();
}
and in fact it performs faster. When parsing a file that doesn't have the optional columns. Here are the average times:
--- Trying:122 milliseconds
--- Checking:33 milliseconds
however, here's what confused me and the reason I'm asking: When running the example with values for the optional columns in all 8000 lines of the CSV, the if() version still performs better than the try/catch version, so my question is
Does really the try block does not have any performance impact on my code?
The average times for this example are:
--- Trying:105 milliseconds
--- Checking:43 milliseconds
Can somebody explain what's going on here?
Thanks a lot
