[WW-2998] Serious OGNL Performance Issues

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.11
• Fix Version/s: 2.3.1
• Component/s: Expression Language

Environment

Windows XP 5.1 (2Gb, dual-core 1.8GHz), Java 1.5.0_08, Tomcat 5.5

• Flags: Important
• Assignee: Lukasz Lenart
• Reporter: Matthew
• Created: 14/Feb/09 16:27
• Updated: 10/Apr/12 08:58
• Resolved: 10/Apr/12 08:58

Description

I am currently running Struts 2.0.11 (planning to upgrade soon) with OGNL 2.6.11 and am having significant trouble with the appalling performance of OGNL.

The following XML using Struts 2 Tags and OGNL takes (using the s2 profiling) 2328ms to render

<%@ page contentType="text/xml" %><%--
-%><%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %><%-
-%><%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %><%-
--%><?xml version="1.0" ?>
<response>
<entities>
<s:iterator value="entities" id="entity">
<entity <%--
-%>id="<s:property value="id"/>" <%-
-%>name="<s:property value="name"/>" <%-
-%>externalId="<s:property value="externalId"/>" <%-
-%>color="<s:property value="renderColor"/>" <%-
-%>image="<s:property value="image.path"/>" <%-
-%>includeInKey="<s:property value="includeInKey"/>" <%-
-%>orderRank="<s:property value="orderRank"/>" <%-
--%> />
</s:iterator>
</entities>
</response>

The exact same functionality, using JSTL tags and EL, takes 15ms

<%@ page contentType="text/xml" %><%--
-%><%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %><%-
-%><%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %><%-
--%><?xml version="1.0" ?>
<response>
<entities>
<c:forEach items="${entities}" var="entity">
<entity <%--
-%>id="<c:out value="${entity.id}"/>" <%-
-%>name="<c:out value="${entity.name}"/>" <%-
-%>externalId="<c:out value="${entity.externalId}"/>" <%-
-%>color="<c:out value="${entity.renderColor}"/>" <%-
-%>image="<c:out value="${entity.image.path}"/>" <%-
-%>includeInKey="<c:out value="${entity.includeInKey}"/>" <%-
-%>orderRank="<c:out value="${entity.orderRank}"/>" <%-
--%> />
</c:forEach>
</entities>
</response>

In this case the S2/OGNL is 150x (!!!!!) slower than the JSTL/EL approach. Now clearly in this case the JSTL/EL approach can be used to get decent performance, but when using S2's Freemarker based tags that option isn't available.