Java Reflection Performance

Question

Does creating an object using reflection rather than calling the class constructor result in any significant performance differences?

Answer 1

Yes - absolutely. Looking up a class via reflection is, by magnitude, more expensive.

Quoting Java's documentation on reflection:

Because reflection involves types that are dynamically resolved, certain Java virtual machine optimizations can not be performed. Consequently, reflective operations have slower performance than their non-reflective counterparts, and should be avoided in sections of code which are called frequently in performance-sensitive applications.

Here's a simple test I hacked up in 5 minutes on my machine, running Sun JRE 6u10:

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        doRegular();
        doReflection();
    }

    public static void doRegular() throws Exception
    {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i<1000000; i++)
        {
            A a = new A();
            a.doSomeThing();
        }
        System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis() - start);
    }

    public static void doReflection() throws Exception
    {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i<1000000; i++)
        {
            A a = (A) Class.forName("misc.A").newInstance();
            a.doSomeThing();
        }
        System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis() - start);
    }
}

With these results:

35 // no reflection
465 // using reflection

Bear in mind the lookup and the instantiation are done together, and in some cases the lookup can be refactored away, but this is just a basic example.

Even if you just instantiate, you still get a performance hit:

30 // no reflection
47 // reflection using one lookup, only instantiating

Again, YMMV.

Answer 2

Yes, it's slower.

But remember the damn #1 rule--PREMATURE OPTIMIZATION IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

(Well, may be tied with #1 for DRY)

I swear, if someone came up to me at work and asked me this I'd be very watchful over their code for the next few months.

You must never optimize until you are sure you need it, until then, just write good, readable code.

Oh, and I don't mean write stupid code either. Just be thinking about the cleanest way you can possibly do it--no copy and paste, etc. (Still be wary of stuff like inner loops and using the collection that best fits your need--Ignoring these isn't "unoptimized" programming, it's "bad" programming)

It freaks me out when I hear questions like this, but then I forget that everyone has to go through learning all the rules themselves before they really get it. You'll get it after you've spent a man-month debugging something someone "Optimized".

EDIT:

An interesting thing happened in this thread. Check the #1 answer, it's an example of how powerful the compiler is at optimizing things. The test is completely invalid because the non-reflective instantiation can be completely factored out.

Lesson? Don't EVER optimize until you've written a clean, neatly coded solution and proven it to be too slow.

Answer 3

You may find that A a = new A() is being optimised out by the JVM. If you put the objects into an array, they don't perform so well. ;) The following prints...

new A(), 141 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 266 ns
new A(), 103 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 261 ns

public class Run {
    private static final int RUNS = 3000000;

    public static class A {
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        doRegular();
        doReflection();
        doRegular();
        doReflection();
    }

    public static void doRegular() throws Exception {
        A[] as = new A[RUNS];
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        for (int i = 0; i < RUNS; i++) {
            as[i] = new A();
        }
        System.out.printf("new A(), %,d ns%n", (System.nanoTime() - start)/RUNS);
    }

    public static void doReflection() throws Exception {
        A[] as = new A[RUNS];
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        for (int i = 0; i < RUNS; i++) {
            as[i] = A.class.newInstance();
        }
        System.out.printf("A.class.newInstance(), %,d ns%n", (System.nanoTime() - start)/RUNS);
    }
}

This suggest the difference is about 150 ns on my machine.

Answer 4

If there really is need for something faster than reflection, and it's not just a premature optimization, then bytecode generation with ASM or a higher level library is an option. Generating the bytecode the first time is slower than just using reflection, but once the bytecode has been generated, it is as fast as normal Java code and will be optimized by the JIT compiler.

Some examples of applications which use code generation:

• Invoking methods on proxies generated by CGLIB is slightly faster than Java's dynamic proxies, because CGLIB generates bytecode for its proxies, but dynamic proxies use only reflection (I measured CGLIB to be about 10x faster in method calls, but creating the proxies was slower).

• JSerial generates bytecode for reading/writing the fields of serialized objects, instead of using reflection. There are some benchmarks on JSerial's site.

• I'm not 100% sure (and I don't feel like reading the source now), but I think Guice generates bytecode to do dependency injection. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Answer 5

"Significant" is entirely dependent on context.

If you're using reflection to create a single handler object based on some configuration file, and then spending the rest of your time running database queries, then it's insignificant. If you're creating large numbers of objects via reflection in a tight loop, then yes, it's significant.

In general, design flexibility (where needed!) should drive your use of reflection, not performance. However, to determine whether performance is an issue, you need to profile rather than get arbitrary responses from a discussion forum.

Answer 6

There is some overhead with reflection, but it's a lot smaller on modern VMs than it used to be.

If you're using reflection to create every simple object in your program then something is wrong. Using it occasionally, when you have good reason, shouldn't be a problem at all.

Answer 7

Yes there is a performance hit when using Reflection but a possible workaround for optimization is caching the method:

  Method md = null;     // Call while looking up the method at each iteration.
      millis = System.currentTimeMillis( );
      for (idx = 0; idx < CALL_AMOUNT; idx++) {
        md = ri.getClass( ).getMethod("getValue", null);
        md.invoke(ri, null);
      }

      System.out.println("Calling method " + CALL_AMOUNT+ " times reflexively with lookup took " + (System.currentTimeMillis( ) - millis) + " millis");



      // Call using a cache of the method.

      md = ri.getClass( ).getMethod("getValue", null);
      millis = System.currentTimeMillis( );
      for (idx = 0; idx < CALL_AMOUNT; idx++) {
        md.invoke(ri, null);
      }
      System.out.println("Calling method " + CALL_AMOUNT + " times reflexively with cache took " + (System.currentTimeMillis( ) - millis) + " millis");

will result in:

[java] Calling method 1000000 times reflexively with lookup took 5618 millis

[java] Calling method 1000000 times reflexively with cache took 270 millis

Answer 8

Interestingly enough, settting setAccessible(true), which skips the security checks, has a 20% reduction in cost.

Without setAccessible(true)

new A(), 70 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 214 ns
new A(), 84 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 229 ns

With setAccessible(true)

new A(), 69 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 159 ns
new A(), 85 ns
A.class.newInstance(), 171 ns

Answer 9

Reflection is slow, though object allocation is not as hopeless as other aspects of reflection. Achieving equivalent performance with reflection-based instantiation requires you to write your code so the jit can tell which class is being instantiated. If the identity of the class can't be determined, then the allocation code can't be inlined. Worse, escape analysis fails, and the object can't be stack-allocated. If you're lucky, the JVM's run-time profiling may come to the rescue if this code gets hot, and may determine dynamically which class predominates and may optimize for that one.

Be aware the microbenchmarks in this thread are deeply flawed, so take them with a grain of salt. The least flawed by far is Peter Lawrey's: it does warmup runs to get the methods jitted, and it (consciously) defeats escape analysis to ensure the allocations are actually occurring. Even that one has its problems, though: for example, the tremendous number of array stores can be expected to defeat caches and store buffers, so this will wind up being mostly a memory benchmark if your allocations are very fast. (Kudos to Peter on getting the conclusion right though: that the difference is "150ns" rather than "2.5x". I suspect he does this kind of thing for a living.)

Answer 10

Yes, it is significantly slower. We were running some code that did that, and while I don't have the metrics available at the moment, the end result was that we had to refactor that code to not use reflection. If you know what the class is, just call the constructor directly.

Answer 11

In the doReflection() is the overhead because of Class.forName("misc.A") (that would require a class lookup, potentially scanning the class path on the filsystem), rather than the newInstance() called on the class. I am wondering what the stats would look like if the Class.forName("misc.A") is done only once outside the for-loop, it doesn't really have to be done for every invocation of the loop.

Answer 12

Yes, always will be slower create an object by reflection because the JVM cannot optimize the code on compilation time. See the Sun/Java Reflection tutorials for more details.

See this simple test:

public class TestSpeed {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        long startTime = System.nanoTime();
        Object instance = new TestSpeed();
        long endTime = System.nanoTime();
        System.out.println(endTime - startTime + "ns");

        startTime = System.nanoTime();
        try {
            Object reflectionInstance = Class.forName("TestSpeed").newInstance();
        } catch (InstantiationException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        endTime = System.nanoTime();
        System.out.println(endTime - startTime + "ns");
    }
}

Answer 13

Often you can use Apache commons BeanUtils or PropertyUtils which introspection (basically they cache the meta data about the classes so they don't always need to use reflection).

Answer 14

I think it depends on how light/heavy the target method is. if the target method is very light(e.g. getter/setter), It could be 1 ~ 3 times slower. if the target method takes about 1 millisecond or above, then the performance will be very close. here is the test I did with Java 8 and reflectasm :

public class ReflectionTest extends TestCase {    
    @Test
    public void test_perf() {
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_01 by refelct", () -> Reflection.on(X.class)._new().invoke("m_01")).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_01 direct call", () -> new X().m_01()).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_02 by refelct", () -> Reflection.on(X.class)._new().invoke("m_02")).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_02 direct call", () -> new X().m_02()).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_11 by refelct", () -> Reflection.on(X.class)._new().invoke("m_11")).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_11 direct call", () -> X.m_11()).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_12 by refelct", () -> Reflection.on(X.class)._new().invoke("m_12")).printResult();    
        Profiler.run(3, 100000, 3, "m_12 direct call", () -> X.m_12()).printResult();
    }

    public static class X {
        public long m_01() {
            return m_11();
        }    
        public long m_02() {
            return m_12();
        }    
        public static long m_11() {
            long sum = IntStream.range(0, 10).sum();
            assertEquals(45, sum);
            return sum;
        }    
        public static long m_12() {
            long sum = IntStream.range(0, 10000).sum();
            assertEquals(49995000, sum);
            return sum;
        }
    }
}

The complete test code is available at GitHub:ReflectionTest.java