Cost of having try-catch statements?

[Reshat Sabiq]

OK, i think i just got onto the same page with this thread. The cost in
1.3.1_05 is negligible (similar to Linux, even smaller). The cost in 1.4.2
and 1.5.0, however, is not negligible.
Now i conclude that it is best to avoid try-catch if possible, for
genericness sake. I will have to provide some logic for this in my case,
to save the .12-.18 seconds in the long term.
It is suprising, however, that the cost on Linux is so small, w/ no
try-catch case being around 200ms. What was the hardware on that test? I
would shout out Linux rules if this metric goes down dramatically (to
50-60ms) on good hardware. Will try to test myself later...

This is the table i got (2000 only has 1.3.1 values):
Try-Catch	XP			Plain	XP
2000 1.3.1_05 1.4.2_04 1.5.0	2000 1.3.1_05 1.4.2_04 1.5.0
297	230	231	180	266	210	60	60
296	220	240	171	266	221	50	50
282	231	230	170	281	210	60	60
297	220	241	171	281	220	50	60
297	230	231	180	266	210	50	60
297	220	230	170	265	221	60	50
297	230	230	180	266	211	50	60
328	221	241	171	281	220	60	50
297	230	231	180	266	211	50	60
297	221	230	180	265	250	60	50
281	231	230	170	281	210	50	60
296	220	231	170	282	220	60	51
282	230	240	180	281	210	50	60
312	220	241	180	281	221	50	50
282	220	240	170	281	210	50	60
328	220	241	180	281	251	50	51
281	220	230	170	282	211	51	70
328	220	230	170	281	220	60	60
297	221	240	171	265	210	50	60
281	220	230	170	266	220	50	60
5953	4475	4688	3484	5484	4367	1071	1142
1.085521517	1.024730937	4.377217554	3.050788091
297.65	223.75	234.4	174.2

Thanks,
<rsa/>

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Reshat Sabiq wrote:

> > Eh.  Maybe my mind is going, but I thought I'd seen a patch to unwind
> > over Windows callbacks.
>
> > Andrew.
>
> This was my question for the past couple of days as well. While i'm not
> versed in the machine language instructions involved, i expected the
> overhead to be minimal, just by thinking how i would implement exception
> handling.
> I would like to ask what platform was the 4-5 times overhead seen on in
> Windows? I just tried the same Main class mentioned by Harald on both
> Windows 2000 and Windows XP using SDK 1.3.1_05. After averaging 10
> executions, the overhead i've seen on 2000 is 8.55%, and on XP it is
> 2.47%. If we considered a method with millions or billions of instructions
> inside, the overhead would be totally miniscule.
> The times i'm getting w/ try-catch are 297.65ms on 2000, and 223.75ms on
> XP.
>
> In general, based on this simple test and the common sense, i'm concluding
> that it is safe to assume that try-catch w/o the exception thrown has
> negligible overhead. While i'm cognizant of GCC builds for Windows from
> MinGW mentioned by Ranjit, that doesn't appeat to apply in most other
> applicable cases, such as when using the regular Sun JVMs and bye-code.
>
> Thanks,
> <rsa/>
>
>