[GROOVY-10454] Performance issue with "Parrot" parser in Groovy 3.x

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 3.0.9
• Component/s: parser-antlr4
• Environment: OpenJdk on Windows & Linux
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Rainer Podlas
• Created: 17/Jan/22 12:25
• Updated: 17/Feb/23 17:12

Description

We have recently upgraded from Groovy 2.4.3 to Groovy 3.0.9 and are now facing a big performance issue when loading/parsing our Groovy sources.

In one concrete example we talk about 60 Groovy source files. Loading them with Groovy 2.4.3 takes < 40 seconds, whereas loading the same sources with Groovy 3.0.9 takes twice the time (~1:20). In another example we notice increased parsing duration from ~ 1,5 minutes to 3 minutes, again a doubling of the duration.

In the release notes I read about the new "Parrot" parser, and indeed, once I disable it via "groovy.antlr4=false" the parsing duration is "back to normal".

That means for now we have a workaround, but as the new "Parrot" parser is going to be the one and only in Groovy 4.x we will be facing a problem in the near future ;-(

Is this performance drop a known issue? I could not find any related tickets?

Please note that we are loading the Groovy sources via the "groovy.lang.GroovyClassLoader" and the method call: "loadClass(path, true, false, true);"

Looking forward to receiving feedback on that.

Thank you very much!

Kind regards, Rainer

Issue Links

• is related to: GROOVY-10307 Groovy 4 runtime performance on average 2.4x slower than Groovy 3
• is related to: GROOVY-10232 Massive increase in memory usage due to CacheableCallSite
• relates to: GROOVY-9785 Performance degradation of groovysh for long scripts