Checking preconditions in advance vs. on demand vs. exceptions

Usually, it is good practice to check certain preconditions before applying operations to input data. This is often referred to as defensive programming. Many people are used to lines like:

public void preformOn(String foo) {
  if (!myMap.containsKey(foo)) {
    // handle it correctly
    return;
  }
  // do something with the entry
  myMap.get(foo).performOperation();
}

While there is nothing wrong with such kind of “in advance checking” it may have performance implications – especially when IO is involved.

We had a problem some time ago when working with some thousand wrappers for File objects. The wrappers checked if the given File object actually is a file using the innocent isFile()-method in the constructor which caused hard disk access each time. So building our collection of wrapped files took quite some time (dozens of seconds) and our client complained (rightfully so!) about the performance. Once the collection was built the operations were fast because no checking was needed anymore.

Our first optimization step was deferring the check to the point where the file was actually used. This sped up the creation of the wrappers so it was barely noticeable but processing a bunch of elements took longer because of additional disk accesses. Even though this approach may work for a plethora of situations for our typical use cases the effect of this optimization was not enough.

So we looked at our problem from another perspective: The vast majority of file handles were actually existing and readable files and directories and foreign/unknown files were the exception. Because of this fact we chose to simply leave out any kind of checks and handle the exceptions! Exception handling is often referred to as slow but if exceptions are rare it can make a difference in some orders of magnitude. Our speed up using this approach was enourmous and the client was happy about sub-second responsiveness for his typical operations. In addition we think that the code now expresses more cleary that irregular files really are the exception and not the rule for this particular code.

Conclusion

There are different approaches to handling of parameters and input data. Depending on the cost of the check and the frequency of special input different strategies may prove beneficial both in expressing your intent and the perceived performance of your application.