Java 8 streams vs iterator performance

Question

I'm comparing 2 ways to filter lists, with and without using streams. It turns out that the method without using streams is faster for a list of 10,000 items. I'm interested in understanding why is it so. Can anyone explain the results please?

public static int countLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams(
        final List<String> words, final int longWordMinLength) {
    words.removeIf(word -> word.length() <= longWordMinLength);

    return words.size();
}

public static int countLongWordsUsingStreams(final List<String> words, final int longWordMinLength) {
    return (int) words.stream().filter(w -> w.length() > longWordMinLength).count();
}

Microbenchmark using JMH:

@Benchmark
@BenchmarkMode(Throughput)
@OutputTimeUnit(MILLISECONDS)
public void benchmarkCountLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams() {
    countLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams(nCopies(10000, "IAmALongWord"), 3);
}

@Benchmark
@BenchmarkMode(Throughput)
@OutputTimeUnit(MILLISECONDS)
public void benchmarkCountLongWordsUsingStreams() {
    countLongWordsUsingStreams(nCopies(10000, "IAmALongWord"), 3);
}

public static void main(String[] args) throws RunnerException {
    final Options opts = new OptionsBuilder()
        .include(PracticeQuestionsCh8Benchmark.class.getSimpleName())
        .warmupIterations(5).measurementIterations(5).forks(1).build();

    new Runner(opts).run();
}

java -jar target/benchmarks.jar -wi 5 -i 5 -f 1

Benchmark
Mode Cnt Score Error Units
PracticeQuestionsCh8Benchmark.benchmarkCountLongWordsUsingStreams thrpt 5 10.219 ± 0.408 ops/ms
PracticeQuestionsCh8Benchmark.benchmarkCountLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams thrpt 5 910.785 ± 21.215 ops/ms

Edit: (as someone deleted the update posted as an answer)

public class PracticeQuestionsCh8Benchmark {
    private static final int NUM_WORDS = 10000;
    private static final int LONG_WORD_MIN_LEN = 10;

    private final List<String> words = makeUpWords();

    public List<String> makeUpWords() {
        List<String> words = new ArrayList<>();
        final Random random = new Random();

        for (int i = 0; i < NUM_WORDS; i++) {
            if (random.nextBoolean()) {
                /*
                 * Do this to avoid string interning. c.f.
                 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_interning
                 */
                words.add(String.format("%" + LONG_WORD_MIN_LEN + "s", i));
            } else {
                words.add(String.valueOf(i));
            }
        }

        return words;
    }

    @Benchmark
    @BenchmarkMode(AverageTime)
    @OutputTimeUnit(MILLISECONDS)
    public int benchmarkCountLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams() {
        return countLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams(words, LONG_WORD_MIN_LEN);
    }

    @Benchmark
    @BenchmarkMode(AverageTime)
    @OutputTimeUnit(MILLISECONDS)
    public int benchmarkCountLongWordsUsingStreams() {
        return countLongWordsUsingStreams(words, LONG_WORD_MIN_LEN);
    }
}
public static int countLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams(
    final List<String> words, final int longWordMinLength) {
    final Predicate<String> p = s -> s.length() >= longWordMinLength;

    int count = 0;

    for (String aWord : words) {
        if (p.test(aWord)) {
            ++count;
        }
    }

    return count;
}

public static int countLongWordsUsingStreams(final List<String> words,
    final int longWordMinLength) {
    return (int) words.stream()
    .filter(w -> w.length() >= longWordMinLength).count();
}

Answer 1

Whenever your benchmark says that some operation over 10000 elements takes 1ns (edit: 1µs), you probably found a case of clever JVM figuring out that your code doesn't actually do anything.

Collections.nCopies doesn't actually make a list of 10000 elements. It makes a sort of a fake list with 1 element and a count of how many times it's supposedly there. That list is also immutable, so your countLongWordsWithoutUsingStreams would throw an exception if there was something for removeIf to do.