Micro-optimization for UUID.fromString in 7 steps

5 min readNov 5, 2015

I spent some time on optimizing UUID.fromString function and I want to share my experience about it. TL;DR — we will improve it’s performance 4+ times in 7 steps.

First of all: such optimizations (micro-level) are not worth (most of the time) of doing it. Wiki article about optimization is quite good. The first rule of optimization — don’t do it. Nevertheless, sometimes it could be fascinating.

So, we have an implementation of UUID.fromString (parses from string values like this: “01234567–89ab-cdef-abcd-ef1234567890” it’s a 128-bit blob) in JDK:

public static UUID fromString(String name) {
    String[] components = name.split("-");
    if (components.length != 5)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid UUID string: "+name);
    for (int i=0; i<5; i++)
        components[i] = "0x"+components[i];

    long mostSigBits = Long.decode(components[0]).longValue();
    ...

The first thing is striking — they use the String.split method to divide a string into components. Of course, it’s not the most efficient way to parse a string:

It uses regular expressions;
It creates an array and new strings (for our case it’s 1 allocation for an array and 5 allocations for components).

0. Replace String.split with a compiled pattern

OK, let’s try to deal with a regular expression by using at least a compiled regular expression:

private static final Pattern SPLIT_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("-");

public static UUID fromStringFast(String s)
{
    String[] components = SPLIT_PATTERN.split(s);

… and this won’t help. Otherwise, it made it worse (473 ns against 353 ns: this is average among 20m repetitions). I looked up to a String.split source and found out that JDK was written by good developers: they’ve done an optimization for 1 and 2-symbol regular expressions so they don’t actually use a regular expressions. Good.

1. Use indexOf/substring instead of split

So, we need to deal with redundant memory allocations by using indexOf method without creating an array (code is simplified, all the check are omitted, but in performance tests it presents).

int component1EndIndex = s.indexOf('-');
int component2EndIndex = s.indexOf('-', component1EndIndex + 1);
int component3EndIndex = s.indexOf('-', component2EndIndex + 1);
int component4EndIndex = s.indexOf('-', component3EndIndex + 1);

long mostSigBits = decode(s, 0, component1EndIndex);
mostSigBits <<= 16;
mostSigBits |=
    decode(s, component1EndIndex + 1, component2EndIndex);...private static long decode(String s, int from, int to) {
    return Long.decode("0x" + s.substring(from, to));
}

Instead of creating an array with 5 strings, we’re looking for 4 hyphens and making substrings. Now we have a gain 340 ns against 353 ns (4%). The gain is not really good, obviously, JIT done something there. But still, we removed not only because of an array allocation — before an array creation in split method the ArrayList is created and then it’s content is copying to the new array (so, this is at least 2 allocations: one for the default ArrayList size (10 elements) and one for the result (5 elements)).

2. Don’t use concatenation

The next strange thing is concatenation. In the original fromString function components are “normalizing” by prepending with the “0x” string to say to Long.decode function that the number is hexadecimal. I don’t really understand the author’s thought — why don’t just use Long.parseLong method with the specified radix? So, this is what we will try to do:

long mostSigBits = substringAndParseLong(s, 0, component1EndIndex);
mostSigBits <<= 16;
mostSigBits |= substringAndParseLong(s, component1EndIndex + 1, component2EndIndex);...static long substringAndParseLong(String s, int from, int to) {
    return parseLong(s.substring(from, to), 16);
}

Much simpler. And faster — 171 ns against 340 ns (50%).

3. Don’t use substring

The only allocations (which are slow operations) left in our implementation are calls to a substring method. The substring creates a new String object and copies an internal character array.

Unfortunately, JDK doesn’t provide parseLong without using the whole String. If we want to avoid allocations, we need to implement parseLong by ourselves (of course, I took the JDK’s one).

long parseLong(String s, final int from, final int to)

Instead of using String indicies from 0 to length, we’re using indicies from from to to.

And now we don’t have any allocations within UUID parsing! The final average time for the method is 145 nanoseconds (almost 3 times faster that the original implementation).

But maybe we can improve it more?

4. Specific replacement for the Character.digit

In the original parseLong method there is this line:

digit = Character.digit(s.charAt(i++), radix);

The function digit returns the actual number for the specified character and radix (5 for ‘5’, 11 for ‘b’ or ‘B’ etc) . Because of a generic nature, there are many unnecessary checks, because in this case we’re using fixed radix — 16. After custom implementation of a digit function we got more gain — 111 ns against 171 ns.

5. Remove redundant checks for parseLong

And the last thing. We used a generic version of a parseLong function. But. We know (for sure) that this is a special use-case: radix is fixed (16), numbers should be positive (minus sign is used as a separator) and there couldn’t be overflow (we simple check the string’s length for it). Code became much simpler and faster: 112 nanoseconds against 171 ns from the Step 3.

Final. Combine Steps 4 and 5

And now let’s combine Steps 4 and 5: use optimized version of the parseLong function and an own implementation of the digit function. And we get the final result: 82 ns against original’s 353 ns (more than 4 times faster).

What I really don’t like here is the specific implementation of the digit function. It consumes additional memory for a cache (not much, but still) and looks really weird.

Personally, I like the Step 5 — use optimized version of a parseLong and JDK’s Character.digit.

Summary

Shortly about our steps:

Step 0 (unsuccessful): replace String.split(“-”) with Pattern.compile(“-”).split (String.split is optimized for it);
Step 1: replace String.split with indexOf/substring (-2 allocations for the ArrayList and the Array of Strings);
Step 2: remove concatenation (additional allocations) and using parseLong instead of heavy decode;
Step 3: don’t use substring at all (no more allocations) — create own parseLong implementation;
Step 4: replace Character.digit with the specific only hex implementation;
Step 5: remove all generic code from our parseLong implementation;
Final: combine Step 4 and Step 5.

Final time table:

Version    | Avg time, ns | Gain to previous | Gain to original
Original   |   353        | 0                | 0
Step 0     |   473        | -120 (-34%)      | -120 (-34%)
Step 1     |   340        |                  | 13 (4%)
Step 2     |   171        | 169 (50%)        | 182 (~2 times)
Step 3     |   145        | 26 (15%)         | 208 (~2.5 times)
Step 4     |   111        | 34 (23%)         | 242 (~3 times)
Step 5     |   112        | -1 (-1%)         | 241 (~3 times)
Final      |    81        | 0                | 272 (~4.5 times)

Conclusion

I think that developers of the JDK were a bit lazy when they implemented UUID.fromString. Maybe they decided that it’s not really important part of the JDK, so no need to spend a more time on it. But at least the step 2 should be done. A strange usage of decode function is really surprising.

I know that the premature optimization is the root of the evil. Nevertheless, I believe that in such important frameworks (like JDK) everything should be optimized. When such code is present from version to version it’s sad (and this is why C++ developers laugh on us).

You can find the full code here.

P.S. After publishing I found out that I had a minor mistake and I’ve rewritten an article a bit (the main idea remained the same).