String vs byte array, Performance

Question

(This post is regarding High Frequency type programming)

I recently saw on a forum (I think they were discussing Java) that if you have to parse a lot of string data its better to use a byte array than a string with a split(). The exact post was:

One performance trick to working with any language, C++, Java, C# is to avoid object creation. It's not the cost of allocation or GC, its the cost to access large memory arrays that dont fit in the CPU cache.

Modern CPU's are much faster than their memory. They stall for many, many cycles for each cache miss. Most of the CPU transister budget is allocated to reduce this with large caches and lots of ticks.

GPU's solve the problem differently by having lots of threads ready to execute to hide memory access latency and have little or no cache and spend the transistors on more cores.

So, for example, rather than using String's and split to parse a message, use byte arrays that can be updated in place. You really want to avoid random memory access over large data structures, at least in the inner loops.

Is he just saying "dont use strings because they're an object and creating objects is costly" ? Or is he saying something else?

Does using a byte array ensure the data remains in the cache for as long as possible? When you use a string is it too large to be held in the CPU cache? Generally, is using the primitive data types the best methods for writing faster code?

Answer 1

He's saying that if you break a chunk text up into separate string objects, those string objects have worse locality than the large array of text. Each string, and the array of characters it contains, is going to be somewhere else in memory; they can be spread all over the place. It is likely that the memory cache will have to thrash in and out to access the various strings as you process the data. In contrast, the one large array has the best possible locality, as all the data is on one area of memory, and cache-thrashing will be kept to a minimum.

There are limits to this, of course: if the text is very, very large, and you only need to parse out part of it, then those few small strings might fit better in the cache than the large chunk of text.