2015-07-11 Tavian Barnes Comments Reddit

In Java, primitives ( int , double , char ) are not Object s. But since a lot of Java code requires Object s, the language provides boxed versions of all primitive types ( Integer , Double , Character ). Autoboxing allows you to write code like

Character boxed = 'a'; char unboxed = boxed;

which is desugared into

Character boxed = Character.valueOf('a'); char unboxed = boxed.charValue();

Unfortunately, the Java Virtual Machine can't always see through this process, so avoiding unnecessary boxing is often key to getting good performance. That's why specialized types like OptionalInt and IntStream exist, for example. In this post, I'm going to outline one of the reasons that autoboxing is hard for the JVM to eliminate.

For a motivating example, lets say we want a generic Levenshtein distance computation that works on any type of data that can be viewed as a sequence:

public class Levenshtein<T, U> { private final Function<T, List<U>> asList; public Levenshtein(Function<T, List<U>> asList) { this.asList = asList; } public int distance(T a, T b) { // Wagner-Fischer algorithm, with two active rows List<U> aList = asList.apply(a); List<U> bList = asList.apply(b); int bSize = bList.size(); int[] row0 = new int[bSize + 1]; int[] row1 = new int[bSize + 1]; for (int i = 0; i <= bSize; ++i) { row0[i] = i; } for (int i = 0; i < bSize; ++i) { U ua = aList.get(i); row1[0] = row0[0] + 1; for (int j = 0; j < bSize; ++j) { U ub = bList.get(j); int subCost = row0[j] + (ua.equals(ub) ? 0 : 1); int delCost = row0[j + 1] + 1; int insCost = row1[j] + 1; row1[j + 1] = Math.min(subCost, Math.min(delCost, insCost)); } int[] temp = row0; row0 = row1; row1 = temp; } return row0[bSize]; } }

As long as your objects can be viewed as a List<U> , this class can compute the edit distance between them. Now we're probably going to want to compute the distance between Strings , so we need a way to view a String as a List :

public class StringAsList extends AbstractList<Character> { private final String str; public StringAsList(String str) { this.str = str; } @Override public Character get(int index) { return str.charAt(index); // Autoboxing! } @Override public int size() { return str.length(); } } ... Levenshtein<String, Character> lev = new Levenshtein<>(StringAsList::new); lev.distance("autoboxing is fast", "autoboxing is slow"); // 4

Because of the way Java generics are implemented, we can't have a List<char> , so we settle for a List<Character> and all the boxing that entails. (As a side note, this limitation may be lifted in Java 10.)

To see what kind of performance we're getting, we need to benchmark the distance() method. Microbenchmarking is very hard to get right in Java, but luckily OpenJDK ships a tool called JMH (Java Microbenchmark Harness) that does most of the hard work for us. If you're interested, I recommend reading the documentation and samples; it's fascinating stuff. Here's the benchmark:

@State(Scope.Benchmark) public class MyBenchmark { private Levenshtein<String, Character> lev = new Levenshtein<>(StringAsList::new); @Benchmark @BenchmarkMode(Mode.AverageTime) @OutputTimeUnit(TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS) public int timeLevenshtein() { return lev.distance("autoboxing is fast", "autoboxing is slow"); } }

(Returning the value from the method allows JMH to do some gymnastics to convince the runtime that the value is used, preventing dead-code elimination from screwing with the results.)

And here are the results:

$ java -jar target/benchmarks.jar -f 1 -wi 8 -i 8 # JMH 1.10.2 (released 3 days ago) # VM invoker: /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk/jre/bin/java # VM options: # Warmup: 8 iterations, 1 s each # Measurement: 8 iterations, 1 s each # Timeout: 10 min per iteration # Threads: 1 thread, will synchronize iterations # Benchmark mode: Average time, time/op # Benchmark: com.tavianator.boxperf.MyBenchmark.timeLevenshtein # Run progress: 0.00% complete, ETA 00:00:16 # Fork: 1 of 1 # Warmup Iteration 1: 1517.495 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 2: 1503.096 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 3: 1402.069 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 4: 1480.584 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 5: 1385.345 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 6: 1474.657 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 7: 1436.749 ns/op # Warmup Iteration 8: 1463.526 ns/op Iteration 1: 1446.033 ns/op Iteration 2: 1420.199 ns/op Iteration 3: 1383.017 ns/op Iteration 4: 1443.775 ns/op Iteration 5: 1393.142 ns/op Iteration 6: 1393.313 ns/op Iteration 7: 1459.974 ns/op Iteration 8: 1456.233 ns/op Result "timeLevenshtein": 1424.461 ±(99.9%) 59.574 ns/op [Average] (min, avg, max) = (1383.017, 1424.461, 1459.974), stdev = 31.158 CI (99.9%): [1364.887, 1484.034] (assumes normal distribution) # Run complete. Total time: 00:00:16 Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units MyBenchmark.timeLevenshtein avgt 8 1424.461 ± 59.574 ns/op

In order to see what's happening on the hot path(s) of your code, JMH integrates with the Linux tool perf to show you the JIT-compiled assembly of the hottest code regions. (To view the assembly, you'll need the hsdis plugin for your platform. If you're running Arch, I have packaged it for you on the AUR.) Simply add -prof perfasm to the JMH command line to see the results:

$ java -jar target/benchmarks.jar -f 1 -wi 8 -i 8 -prof perfasm ... cmp $0x7f,%eax jg 0x00007fde989a6148 ;*if_icmpgt ; - java.lang.Character::valueOf@3 (line 4570) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@8 (line 14) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@2 (line 5) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.Levenshtein::distance@121 (line 32) cmp $0x80,%eax jae 0x00007fde989a6103 ;*aaload ; - java.lang.Character::valueOf@10 (line 4571) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@8 (line 14) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@2 (line 5) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.Levenshtein::distance@121 (line 32) ...

There's a lot of output, but sections like the above indicate that the boxing hasn't been optimized out. And what's the deal with the comparisons to 0x7f / 0x80 ? The answer is in the source for Character.valueOf() :

private static class CharacterCache { private CharacterCache(){} static final Character cache[] = new Character[127 + 1]; static { for (int i = 0; i < cache.length; i++) cache[i] = new Character((char)i); } } public static Character valueOf(char c) { if (c <= 127) { // must cache return CharacterCache.cache[(int)c]; } return new Character(c); }

It turns out the Java Language Standard mandates that Character.valueOf() reuse cached Character instances for the first 127 char s. The goal is to reduce allocations and garbage collections, but it seems like premature optimization to me. And here it's impeding other optimizations! The JVM can't tell that Character.valueOf(c).charValue() == c , because it doesn't know the contents of the cache array. So instead it grabs a Character from the cache and reads its value, just to end up with the same value it started with.

The workaround is pretty simple:

@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ public class StringAsList extends AbstractList<Character> { @Override public Character get(int index) { - return str.charAt(index); // Autoboxing! + return new Character(str.charAt(index)); } @Override

By replacing the autoboxing with explicit boxing, avoiding Character.valueOf() altogether, the code becomes much easier for the JVM to reason about:

private final char value; public Character(char value) { this.value = value; } public char charValue() { return value; }

Even though we've "added" an allocation, the JVM sees right through it and simply grabs the char directly out of the String . The performance boost is noticeable:

$ java -jar target/benchmarks.jar -f 1 -wi 8 -i 8 ... # Run complete. Total time: 00:00:16 Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units MyBenchmark.timeLevenshtein avgt 8 1221.151 ± 58.878 ns/op

A full 14% faster. -prof perfasm confirms that char values are loaded right out of the String and compared in registers:

movzwl 0x10(%rsi,%rdx,2),%r11d ;*caload ; - java.lang.String::charAt@27 (line 648) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@9 (line 14) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.StringAsList::get@2 (line 5) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.Levenshtein::distance@121 (line 32) cmp %r11d,%r10d je 0x00007faa8d404792 ;*if_icmpne ; - java.lang.Character::equals@18 (line 4621) ; - com.tavianator.boxperf.Levenshtein::distance@137 (line 33)

Boxing is still a weak area for HotSpot, and I'd like to see it become better. It should take more advantage of the semantics of boxed types to eliminate boxing in more cases, removing the need for these workarounds.

All the code used for these benchmarks is available on GitHub.