performance of Stream vs Collections

I’m new to Java 8. I don’t know the API in depth yet, but I’ve created a small informal benchmark to compare the performance of the new Streams API against the good old collections.

The test consists of filtering a list of Integer and, for each even number, calculate the square root and store it in a result List from Double.

Here is the code:

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        //Calculating square root of even numbers from 1 to N       
        int min = 1;
        int max = 1000000;

        List sourceList = new ArrayList<>();
        for (int i = min; i < max; i++) {
            sourceList.add(i);
        }

        List result = new LinkedList<>();


        //Collections approach
        long t0 = System.nanoTime();
        long elapsed = 0;
        for (Integer i : sourceList) {
            if(i % 2 == 0){
                result.add(Math.sqrt(i));
            }
        }
        elapsed = System.nanoTime() - t0;       
        System.out.printf("Collections: Elapsed time:\t %d ns \t(%f seconds)%n", elapsed, elapsed / Math.pow(10, 9));


        //Stream approach
        Stream stream = sourceList.stream();       
        t0 = System.nanoTime();
        result = stream.filter(i -> i%2 == 0).map(i -> Math.sqrt(i)).collect(Collectors.toList());
        elapsed = System.nanoTime() - t0;       
        System.out.printf("Streams: Elapsed time:\t\t %d ns \t(%f seconds)%n", elapsed, elapsed / Math.pow(10, 9));


        //Parallel stream approach
        stream = sourceList.stream().parallel();        
        t0 = System.nanoTime();
        result = stream.filter(i -> i%2 == 0).map(i -> Math.sqrt(i)).collect(Collectors.toList());
        elapsed = System.nanoTime() - t0;       
        System.out.printf("Parallel streams: Elapsed time:\t %d ns \t(%f seconds)%n", elapsed, elapsed / Math.pow(10, 9));      
    }.

And here are the results for a dual core machine:

    Collections: Elapsed time:        94338247 ns   (0,094338 seconds)
    Streams: Elapsed time:           201112924 ns   (0,201113 seconds)
    Parallel streams: Elapsed time:  357243629 ns   (0,357244 seconds)

For this particular test, streams are about twice as slow as collections, and parallelism doesn’t help (or am I using it the wrong way?).

Requests:

  • Is this test right? Did I make any mistakes?
  • Are flows slower than collections? Has anyone made a good formal reference on this?
  • Which approach should I strive for?

Updated results.

I ran the test 1k times after JVM warm up (1k iterations) as recommended by @pveentjer:

    Collections: Average time:      206884437,000000 ns     (0,206884 seconds)
    Streams: Average time:           98366725,000000 ns     (0,098367 seconds)
    Parallel streams: Average time: 167703705,000000 ns     (0,167704 seconds)

In this case the flows are more efficient. I wonder what would be observed in an app where the filter function is only called once or twice during runtime.

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