Major Description
A recent issue was raised against Velocity 1.6.2 which invokes the variable toString method when checking if a variable exists or not.
Thus the following snippet would invoke the Table's toString method twice:
#if ($table)
$table
#end
This can have quite a large impact on performance. This issue[1] was recently solved in Velocity by introducing a runtime property that sets behavior back to the old default.
However Velocity 1.6.2 is not released yet but we can switch to the unreleased 1.6.3 in the meantime.