What's the quickest way to compare strings in Java?

Question

What\'s the quickest to compare two strings in Java?

Is there something faster than equals?

EDIT: I can not help much to clarify the problem.

I have

Answer 1

I had tries different combinations for string comparison (code here):

1. s1.equals(s2)
2. s1.length() == s2.length() && s1.hashCode() == s2.hashCode() && s1.equals(s2)
3. s1.hashCode() == s2.hashCode() && s1.equals(s2);
4. s1.length() == s2.length() && s1.equals(s2);

I used strings of 40 chars length, in 10000000000L iterations and before any iteration I reinitialized the strings.

for equal stings I got:

equal: 2873 milis ???
equal: 21386 milis
equal: 7181 milis
equal: 2710 milis ???

for same size strings but last char different I got:

different: 3011 milis
different: 23415 milis
different: 6924 milis
different: 2791 milis

for different sizes, almost same strings but one char added at the end for s2:

different size: 3167 milis
different size: 5188 milis
different size: 6902 milis
different size: 2951 milis

seems to me it is best to use first a string.length() comparison before equals().

But this will not matter almost at all because this is the case where I have 10^10 string comparisons with 40 chars length and what is bizarre for me is the case where for equal strings I have a better speed when I compare the string length first.