Performance penalty of String.intern()

I did a little bit of benchmarking myself. For the search cost part, I've decided to compare String.intern() with ConcurrentHashMap.putIfAbsent(s,s). Basically, those two methods do the same things, except String.intern() is a native method that stores and read from a SymbolTable that is managed directly in the JVM, and ConcurrentHashMap.putIfAbsent() is just a normal instance method.

You can find the benchmark code on github gist (for a lack of a better place to put it). You can also find the options I used when launching the JVM (to verify that the benchmark is not skewed) in the comments at the top of the source file.

Anyway here are the results:

Search cost (single threaded)

Legend

• count: the number of distinct strings that we are trying to pool
• initial intern: the time in ms it took to insert all the strings in the string pool
• lookup same string: the time in ms it took to lookup each of the strings again from the pool, using exactly the same instance as was previously entered in the pool
• lookup equal string: the time in ms it took to lookup each of the strings again from the pool, but using a different instance

String.intern()

count       initial intern   lookup same string  lookup equal string
1'000'000            40206                34698                35000
  400'000             5198                 4481                 4477
  200'000              955                  828                  803
  100'000              234                  215                  220
   80'000              110                   94                   99
   40'000               52                   30                   32
   20'000               20                   10                   13
   10'000                7                    5                    7

ConcurrentHashMap.putIfAbsent()

count       initial intern   lookup same string  lookup equal string
1'000'000              411                  246                  309
  800'000              352                  194                  229
  400'000              162                   95                  114
  200'000               78                   50                   55
  100'000               41                   28                   28
   80'000               31                   23                   22
   40'000               20                   14                   16
   20'000               12                    6                    7
   10'000                9                    5                    3

The conclusion for the search cost: String.intern() is surprisingly expensive to call. It scales extremely badly, in something of O(n) where n is the number of strings in the pool. When the number of strings in the pool grows, the amount of time to lookup one string from the pool grows much more (0.7 microsecond per lookup with 10'000 strings, 40 microseconds per lookup with 1'000'000 strings).

ConcurrentHashMap scales as expected, the number of strings in the pool has no impact on the speed of the lookup.

Based on this experiment, I'd strongly suggest avoiding to use String.intern() if you are going to intern more than a few strings.

I have recently written an article about String.intern() implementation in Java 6, 7 and 8: String.intern in Java 6, 7 and 8 - string pooling.

There is a -XX:StringTableSize JVM parameter, which will allow you to make String.intern extremely useful in Java7+. So, unfortunately I have to say that this question is currently giving the misleading information to the readers.