performance - Java Reflection: Why is it so slow?

Question

I've always avoided Java reflection soley based on its reputation for slowness. I reached a point in the design of my current project where being able to use it would make my code much more readable and elegant, so I decided to give it a go.

I was simply astonished by the difference, I noticed at times almost 100x longer run times. Even in this simple example where it just instantiates an empty class, it's unbelievable.

class B {

}

public class Test {

    public static long timeDiff(long old) {
        return System.currentTimeMillis() - old;
    }

    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {

        long numTrials = (long) Math.pow(10, 7);

        long millis;

        millis = System.currentTimeMillis();

        for (int i=0; i<numTrials; i++) {
            new B();
        }
        System.out.println("Normal instaniation took: "
                 + timeDiff(millis) + "ms");

        millis = System.currentTimeMillis();

        Class<B> c = B.class;

        for (int i=0; i<numTrials; i++) {
            c.newInstance();
        }

        System.out.println("Reflecting instantiation took:" 
              + timeDiff(millis) + "ms");

    }
}

So really, my questions are

• Why is it this slow? Is there something I'm doing wrong? (even the example above demonstrates the difference). I have a hard time believing that it can really be 100x slower than normal instantiation.

• Is there something else that can be better used for treating code as Data (bear in mind I'm stuck with Java for now)

Answer 1

Reflection is slow for a few obvious reasons:

1. The compiler can do no optimization whatsoever as it can have no real idea about what you are doing. This probably goes for the JIT as well
2. Everything being invoked/created has to be discovered (i.e. classes looked up by name, methods looked at for matches etc)
3. Arguments need to be dressed up via boxing/unboxing, packing into arrays, Exceptions wrapped in InvocationTargetExceptions and re-thrown etc.
4. All the processing that Jon Skeet mentions here.

Just because something is 100x slower does not mean it is too slow for you assuming that reflection is the "right way" for you to design your program. For example, I imagine that IDEs make heavy use of reflection and my IDE is mostly OK from a performance perspective.

After all, the overhead of reflection is likely to pale into insignificance when compared with, say, parsing XML or accessing a database!

Another point to remember is that micro-benchmarks are a notoriously flawed mechanism for determining how fast something is in practice. As well as Tim Bender's remarks, the JVM takes time to "warm up", the JIT can re-optimize code hotspots on-the-fly etc.