[jdom-interest] NoSuch*Exceptions in JDOM

[Petri Wessman]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2000 11:25:47 -0500, philip.nelson at omniresources.com said:

philip> A typical result with 1,000,000 accesses of an exisiting element was
philip> something like this
philip> Time (ms) without exception: 3616
philip> Time (ms) with exception: 3605
philip> In reverse order....
philip> Time (ms) with exception: 3735
philip> Time (ms) without exception: 3715
philip> In reverse order again....
philip> Time (ms) without exception: 3676
philip> Time (ms) with exception: 3665

philip> I can't explain why the first call was a little slower whether
philip> or not an exception was used.  The code is very simple so
philip> maybe someone else could explain it.  Barring some obvious
philip> problem with that, it would seem that on my computer (Win NT
philip> WS 4.0 Sun JDK 1.2.2) there is not a dramatic difference with
philip> or without exceptions.  I did see a somewhat greater
philip> difference running in my IDE but I was running with JUnit so I
philip> don't completely trust the results.

I see the problem in your test case: you're testing for a child which
exists in the XML. In this case the difference between the methods is
non-existent (as your test proves).

Declaring that something throws exceptions is not expensive. Actually
throwing the exceptions is.

Try running your code with the lines

		Element test = form.getOptionalChild("field");

changed to something line

		Element test = form.getOptionalChild("nosuchelement");

I think you'll see quite dramatic differences.

//Petri