How efficient is std::string compared to null-terminated strings?

Question

I\'ve discovered that std::strings are very slow compared to old-fashioned null-terminated strings, so much slow that they significantly slow down my overall pr

Answer 1

A large part of the reason might be the fact that reference-counting is no longer used in modern implementations of STL.

Here's the story (someone correct me if I'm wrong): in the beginning, STL implementations used reference counting, and were fast but not thread-safe - the implementors expected application programmers to insert their own locking mechanisms at higher levels, to make them thread-safe, because if locking was done at 2 levels then this would slow things down twice as much.

However, the programmers of the world were too ignorant or lazy to insert locks everywhere. For example, if a worker thread in a multi-threaded program needed to read a std::string commandline parameter, then a lock would be needed even just to read the string, otherwise crashes could ensue. (2 threads increment the reference count simultaneously on different CPU's (+1), but decrement it separately (-2), so the reference count goes down to zero, and the memory is freed.)

So implementors ditched reference counting and instead had each std::string always own its own copy of the string. More programs worked, but they were all slower.

So now, even a humble assignment of one std::string to another, (or equivalently, passing a std::string as a parameter to a function), takes about 400 machine code instructions instead of the 2 it takes to assign a char*, a slowdown of 200 times.

I tested the magnitude of the inefficiency of std::string on one major program, which had an overall slowdown of about 100% compared with null-terminated strings. I also tested raw std::string assignment using the following code, which said that std::string assignment was 100-900 times slower. (I had trouble measuring the speed of char* assignment). I also debugged into the std::string operator=() function - I ended up knee deep in the stack, about 7 layers deep, before hitting the 'memcpy()'.

I'm not sure there's any solution. Perhaps if you need your program to be fast, use plain old C++, and if you're more concerned about your own productivity, you should use Java.

#define LIMIT 800000000
clock_t start;
std::string foo1 = "Hello there buddy";
std::string foo2 = "Hello there buddy, yeah you too";
std::string f;

start = clock();
for (int i=0; i < LIMIT; i++) {
    stop();
    f    = foo1;
    foo1 = foo2;
    foo2 = f;
}
double stl = double(clock() - start) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

start = clock();
for (int i=0; i < LIMIT; i++) {
    stop();
}
double emptyLoop = double(clock() - start) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

char* goo1 = "Hello there buddy";
char* goo2 = "Hello there buddy, yeah you too";
char *g;

start = clock();
for (int i=0; i < LIMIT; i++) {
    stop();
    g = goo1;
    goo1 = goo2;
    goo2 = g;
}
double charLoop = double(clock() - start) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

TfcMessage("done", 'i', "Empty loop = %1.3f s\n"
                        "char* loop = %1.3f s\n"
                        "std::string loop = %1.3f s\n\n"
                        "slowdown = %f", 
                        emptyLoop, charLoop, stl, 
                        (stl - emptyLoop) / (charLoop - emptyLoop));