Groovy performance test

A few days ago I came across an article about Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org). It took me so I decided to go through useful Groovy tutorial (you can find it here http://www.asert.com/pubs/Groovy/Groovy.pdf). Groovy is a scripting language based on Java. You can write your Java code in much simpler way using Groovy and you can whenever use legacy Java code in your Groovy code if you want to. Groovy adds to Java language closures, domain specific languages, metaprogramming and extends existing Java classes too (e.g. Groovy adds method eachLine(Closure closure) to standard java.io.File class). Groovy has also direct support for SQL, SOAP, web services, COM scripting, servlets and much more. Groovy seems to be very development oriented so I decided to do basic performance testing to see Groovy’s performance because performance is the most important question for every developer (I hope at least :-)).

Before testing itself it would be worthy to show you briefly how Groovy works e.g. with collections. Let’s have the following Groovy snippet:

names = ["Ted", "Fred", "Jed", "Ned"]
println names
shortNames = names.findAll{ it.size() <= 3 } println shortNames.size() shortNames.each{ println it }

You should notice that Groovy doesn’t force you to use semicolons. Now let’s move to the code itself. The first line declares and defines a list of four strings – “Ted”, “Fred”, “Jed” and “Ned”. The second line prints the list to the standard output. The third line uses closures (finally something more interesting ;-)). It takes each value in list ‘names’ and run a closure { it.size() <= 3 } over it. ‘it’ in the closure refers to a parameter to the closure. 'findAll' method finds and returns all values in ‘names’ list for which the closure returns value ‘true’. So ‘shortNames’ would be a list containing values from list ‘names’ with size lower or equal to 3. The fourth line prints the size of the list ‘shortNames’. Finally the fifth line prints all the values in list ‘shortNames’. The output is:

["Ted", "Fred", "Jed", "Ned"]
3
Ted
Jed
Ned

I hope you enjoyed short Groovy example and if you want to try on your own then simply download and install Groovy, run GroovyConsole, copy there the snippet above and run it.

Maybe you are wondering how the Groovy works. Groovy source code is converted into common Java code and then compiled using compiler to the Java byte code. In the Groovy source code the Groovy specific code (non normal Java one) is wrapped during conversion into Groovy's comon Java classes to get work. This wrapping certainly has a performance impact on your application and that’s the reason why I decided to do a performance test. Groovy has its own executable for running source codes (groovy.exe in Windows) and the executable accepts (among others) the same arguments as Java’s executable (java.exe). I run all the tests with arguments –Xms64m and –Xmx512m to ensure that memory conditions are the same.

The first feature I would like to test was file access. The test creates a new file, writes numbers 0 to 25000 into it (one number per line), closes the file then opens again, read all the lines and print the sum of the numbers to ensure that everything was all right. Source code in Java is:

File file = new File("temp.txt");
file.createNewFile();
PrintStream printer = new PrintStream(file);
long before = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i = 0; i <= 25000; i++) { printer.println(i); } long after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Writing done in: " + (after - before)); printer.close(); long result = 0; BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file)); for (int i = 0; i <= 25000; i++) { result += Integer.parseInt(reader.readLine()); } after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Reading done in: " + (after - before)); reader.close(); System.out.println("Result: " + result); file.delete();

And corresponding code in Groovy is:

file = new File("temp.txt")
before = System.currentTimeMillis()
for (i in 0..25000) file.append(i + "\n")
after = System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Writing done in: " + (after - before)
long result = 0
before = System.currentTimeMillis()
file.eachLine( { result += Integer.parseInt(it)} )
after = System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Result: " + result
file.delete()
println "Reading done in: " + (after - before)

The result was partially unexpected because while writing performance was much better in Java, reading performance was better in Groovy although I was using BufferedReader in Java. Even setting the size of the buffer to higher value had no effect. I tried to find source code of Groovy’s java.io.File class but although the Groovy is open source, I had no success. Could anyone help me please? You can see the test results below.

The second feature I would like to test was collection access. I chose List (concretely ArrayList). The test creates new collection, adds 100 000 values and then removes the first 1000 values. Removing a value results in shifting remaining values to the left thus removing all 100 000 values would take very much of time. Source code in Java is:

List stringList = new ArrayList();
long before = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i = 0; i <= 100000; i++) { stringList.add(String.valueOf(i*i)); } long after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Added in: " + (after - before)); before = System.currentTimeMillis(); for (int i = 0; i <= 1000; i++) { stringList.remove(i); } after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Removed in: " + (after - before));

And corresponding code in Groovy is:

def stringList = []
before= System.currentTimeMillis()
for (int i in 0..1000000) stringList.add(String.valueOf(i*i))
after=System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Added in: " + (after - before) + " ms"
before= System.currentTimeMillis()
for (int i in 0..1000) stringList.remove(i)
after=System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Removed in: " + (after - before) + " ms"

The result didn’t surprise me at all, in both cases had the Java much better performance (adding values was even 65x faster) than Groovy. You can see the result below.

The final feature I would like to test was database access. I chose the 100% pure Java database – HSQLDB about which I’m going to write an article in the future. The test itself inserts into a simple table 25 000 records and then selects them and count the sum. Source code in Java is:

try {
Class.forName("org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver");
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
Connection dbConnection = null;
Statement statement = null;
try {
dbConnection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/mydb", "sa", "sa");
statement = dbConnection.createStatement();
statement.executeUpdate("DELETE FROM \"test\"");
long before = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i = 0; i <= 25000; i++) { statement.executeUpdate("INSERT INTO \"test\" VALUES (" + i + ", " + i + ")"); } long after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Data inserting: " + (after - before) + " ms"); ResultSet data = statement.executeQuery("SELECT VALUE FROM \"test\""); long result = 0; before = System.currentTimeMillis(); while (data.next()) { int value = data.getInt(1); result += value; } after = System.currentTimeMillis(); System.out.println("Data selecting: " + (after - before) + " ms"); data.close(); statement.close(); dbConnection.close(); System.out.println("result: " + result); } catch (SQLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); }

And corresponding code in Groovy is:

import groovy.sql.Sql

def sql = Sql.newInstance("jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/mydb", "sa", "sa", "org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver")
sql.executeUpdate("DELETE FROM \"test\"")
before = System.currentTimeMillis()
for (i in 0..25000) {
sql.executeUpdate("INSERT INTO \"test\" VALUES (${i}, ${i})")
}
after = System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Data inserting: " + (after - before) + " ms"
long result = 0;
before = System.currentTimeMillis()
sql.eachRow("select value from \"test\"") { result += it.value }
after = System.currentTimeMillis()
println "Data selecting: " + (after - before) + " ms"
println "Result: " + result

You can see that code in Groovy is really much shorter and simpler, but what about the performance? Again had the Java much better performance than Groovy, you can see the result below.

Conclusion

In the beginning I was really very curios how fast is Groovy going to be and in the end I was very disappointed. Of course that I expected lower performance than in Java, but I didn’t such huge performance impact. On the other hand Groovy is surely appealing project that just need a performance tuning to be done. I can recommend you trying Groovy but I don’t recommend you to develop a high performance application using it.