[VELOCITY-979] Performance issue with comparing strings in Velocity

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.3
• Component/s: Engine
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Alex
• Created: 29/Feb/24 22:43
• Updated: 01/Mar/24 10:57

Description

Most Velocity compare expressions eventually use ASTComparisonNode which at first attempts to treat data types as numbers:

 
Boolean result = compareNumbers(left, right);
if (result == null)

{ result = compareNonNumber(left, right); }

 
There is fairly large overhead when attempting to create BigDecimal from non-numeric strings used in comparison in the DuckType.asNumber:
 
if (coerceType)
{
String string = asString(value);// coerce to string
if (string != null)

{ return new BigDecimal(string); }

}
 
The exception is created capturing stack, etc. On large volume of compare operations it's very visible.