Re: Java vs C++ speed (IO & Sorting)

From:
Christopher <cpisz@austin.rr.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:53:49 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<d6664ddc-5e08-4432-a548-5e6dc159f908@a23g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 20, 1:10 am, Razii <fdgl...@hotmails.com> wrote:

This topic was on these newsgroups 7 years ago :)

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/msg/695ebf877e25b287

I said then: "How about reading the whole Bible, sorting by lines, and
writing the sorted book to a file?"

Who remember that from 7 years ago, one of the longest thread on this
newsgroup :)

The text file used for the bible is hereftp://ftp.cs.princeton.edu/pub/cs126/markov/textfiles/bible.txt

Back to see if anything has changed

(downloaded whatever is latest version from sun.java.com)

Time for reading, sorting, writing: 359 ms (Java)
Time for reading, sorting, writing: 375 ms (Java)
Time for reading, sorting, writing: 375 ms (Java)

Visual C++ express and command I used was cl IOSort.cpp /O2

Time for reading, sorting, writing: 375 ms (c++)
Time for reading, sorting, writing: 390 ms (c++)
Time for reading, sorting, writing: 359 ms (c++)

The question still is (7 years later), where is great speed advantage
you guys were claiming for c++?

------------------- Java Code -------------- (same as 7 years ago :)

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class IOSort
{
    public static void main(String[] arg) throws Exception
   {
            ArrayList ar = new ArrayList(5000);

            String line = "";

            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                new FileReader("bible.txt"));
            PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(
                new FileWriter("output.txt")));

            long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
            while (true)
            {
                line = in.readLine();
                if (line == null)
                  break;
                if (line.length() == 0)
                 continue;
                ar.add(line);
            }

            Collections.sort(ar);
            int size = ar.size();
            for (int i = 0; i < size; i++)
            {
                out.println(ar.get(i));
            }
            out.close();
            long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
           System.out.println("Time for reading, sorting, writing: "+
(end - start) + " ms");
   }

}

--------- C++ Code ---------------

#include <fstream>
#include<iostream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>
#include <ctime>
using namespace ::std;

int main()
{
   vector<string> buf;
   string linBuf;
   ifstream inFile("bible.txt");
   clock_t start=clock();
   buf.reserve(50000);

   while(getline(inFile,linBuf)) buf.insert(buf.end(), linBuf);
   sort(buf.begin(), buf.end());
   ofstream outFile("output.txt");
   copy(buf.begin(),buf.end(),ostream_iterator<string>(outFile,"\n"));
clock_t endt=clock();
   cout <<"Time for reading, sorting, writing: " << endt-start << "
ms\n";
   return 0;

}


I like how you start the time _after_ allocations and initializations
for Java, but _before_ them in C++.
Also, clock has granularity has big as my toe. I've seen it skew as
much as a second on some machines. There are several pages on Google
on how to do _REAL_ performance time measurements. It gets even worse
on multi-core systems.

To be completely fair, I'd start a performance timer, start another
process to do the work, let the process exit, stop the timer. I'd also
limit both to a single core, and use a timer that has a guaranteed
granularity of 1 ms. Only then could you say ,"Java parsed and sorted
this particular example faster than C++" and that would be all you
could say.

I'm not trying to say one language performs better than the other.
Frankly, I don't care. But your experiment defies several laws of
scientific testing.

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