Does this mean that Java Math.floor is extremely slow?

Question

I don\'t Java much.

I am writing some optimized math code and I was shocked by my profiler results. My code collects values, interleaves the data and then chooses th

Answer 1

It is worth noting that monitoring a method takes some overhead and in the case of VisualVM, this is fairly high. If you have a method which is called often but does very little it can appear to use lots of CPU. e.g. I have seen Integer.hashCode() as a big hitter once. ;)

On my machine a floor takes less 5.6 ns, but a cast takes 2.3 ns. You might like to try this on your machine.

---

Unless you need to handle corner cases, a plain cast is faster.

// Rounds to zero, instead of Negative infinity.
public static double floor(double a) {
    return (long) a;
}

---

public static void main(String... args) {
    int size = 100000;
    double[] a = new double[size];
    double[] b = new double[size];
    double[] c = new double[size];
    for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++) a[i] = Math.random()  * 1e6;

    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        timeCast(a, b);
        timeFloor(a, c);
        for (int j = 0; j < size; j++)
            if (b[i] != c[i])
                System.err.println(a[i] + ": " + b[i] + " " + c[i]);
    }
}

public static double floor(double a) {
    return a < 0 ? -(long) -a : (long) a;
}

private static void timeCast(double[] from, double[] to) {
    long start = System.nanoTime();
    for (int i = 0; i < from.length; i++)
        to[i] = floor(from[i]);
    long time = System.nanoTime() - start;
    System.out.printf("Cast took an average of %.1f ns%n", (double) time / from.length);
}

private static void timeFloor(double[] from, double[] to) {
    long start = System.nanoTime();
    for (int i = 0; i < from.length; i++)
        to[i] = Math.floor(from[i]);
    long time = System.nanoTime() - start;
    System.out.printf("Math.floor took an average of %.1f ns%n", (double) time / from.length);
}

prints

Cast took an average of 62.1 ns
Math.floor took an average of 123.6 ns
Cast took an average of 61.9 ns
Math.floor took an average of 6.3 ns
Cast took an average of 47.2 ns
Math.floor took an average of 6.5 ns
Cast took an average of 2.3 ns
Math.floor took an average of 5.6 ns
Cast took an average of 2.3 ns
Math.floor took an average of 5.6 ns