String concatenation: concat() vs "+" operator

Niyaz is correct, but it's also worth noting that the special + operator can be converted into something more efficient by the Java compiler. Java has a StringBuilder class which represents a non-thread-safe, mutable String. When performing a bunch of String concatenations, the Java compiler silently converts

String a = b + c + d;

into

String a = new StringBuilder(b).append(c).append(d).toString();

which for large strings is significantly more efficient. As far as I know, this does not happen when you use the concat method.

However, the concat method is more efficient when concatenating an empty String onto an existing String. In this case, the JVM does not need to create a new String object and can simply return the existing one. See the concat documentation to confirm this.

So if you're super-concerned about efficiency then you should use the concat method when concatenating possibly-empty Strings, and use + otherwise. However, the performance difference should be negligible and you probably shouldn't ever worry about this.

I ran a similar test as @marcio but with the following loop instead:

String c = a;
for (long i = 0; i < 100000L; i++) {
    c = c.concat(b); // make sure javac cannot skip the loop
    // using c += b for the alternative
}

Just for good measure, I threw in StringBuilder.append() as well. Each test was run 10 times, with 100k reps for each run. Here are the results:

• StringBuilder wins hands down. The clock time result was 0 for most the runs, and the longest took 16ms.
• a += b takes about 40000ms (40s) for each run.
• concat only requires 10000ms (10s) per run.

I haven't decompiled the class to see the internals or run it through profiler yet, but I suspect a += b spends much of the time creating new objects of StringBuilder and then converting them back to String.

Most answers here are from 2008. It looks that things have changed over the time. My latest benchmarks made with JMH shows that on Java 8 + is around two times faster than concat.

My benchmark:

@Warmup(iterations = 5, time = 200, timeUnit = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
@Measurement(iterations = 5, time = 200, timeUnit = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
public class StringConcatenation {

    @org.openjdk.jmh.annotations.State(Scope.Thread)
    public static class State2 {
        public String a = "abc";
        public String b = "xyz";
    }

    @org.openjdk.jmh.annotations.State(Scope.Thread)
    public static class State3 {
        public String a = "abc";
        public String b = "xyz";
        public String c = "123";
    }


    @org.openjdk.jmh.annotations.State(Scope.Thread)
    public static class State4 {
        public String a = "abc";
        public String b = "xyz";
        public String c = "123";
        public String d = "[email protected]#";
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void plus_2(State2 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a+state.b);
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void plus_3(State3 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a+state.b+state.c);
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void plus_4(State4 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a+state.b+state.c+state.d);
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void stringbuilder_2(State2 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(new StringBuilder().append(state.a).append(state.b).toString());
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void stringbuilder_3(State3 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(new StringBuilder().append(state.a).append(state.b).append(state.c).toString());
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void stringbuilder_4(State4 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(new StringBuilder().append(state.a).append(state.b).append(state.c).append(state.d).toString());
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void concat_2(State2 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a.concat(state.b));
    }

    @Benchmark
    public void concat_3(State3 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a.concat(state.b.concat(state.c)));
    }


    @Benchmark
    public void concat_4(State4 state, Blackhole blackhole) {
        blackhole.consume(state.a.concat(state.b.concat(state.c.concat(state.d))));
    }
}

Results:

Benchmark                             Mode  Cnt         Score         Error  Units
StringConcatenation.concat_2         thrpt   50  24908871.258 ± 1011269.986  ops/s
StringConcatenation.concat_3         thrpt   50  14228193.918 ±  466892.616  ops/s
StringConcatenation.concat_4         thrpt   50   9845069.776 ±  350532.591  ops/s
StringConcatenation.plus_2           thrpt   50  38999662.292 ± 8107397.316  ops/s
StringConcatenation.plus_3           thrpt   50  34985722.222 ± 5442660.250  ops/s
StringConcatenation.plus_4           thrpt   50  31910376.337 ± 2861001.162  ops/s
StringConcatenation.stringbuilder_2  thrpt   50  40472888.230 ± 9011210.632  ops/s
StringConcatenation.stringbuilder_3  thrpt   50  33902151.616 ± 5449026.680  ops/s
StringConcatenation.stringbuilder_4  thrpt   50  29220479.267 ± 3435315.681  ops/s

Tom is correct in describing exactly what the + operator does. It creates a temporary StringBuilder, appends the parts, and finishes with toString().

However, all of the answers so far are ignoring the effects of HotSpot runtime optimizations. Specifically, these temporary operations are recognized as a common pattern and are replaced with more efficient machine code at run-time.

@marcio: You've created a micro-benchmark; with modern JVM's this is not a valid way to profile code.

The reason run-time optimization matters is that many of these differences in code -- even including object-creation -- are completely different once HotSpot gets going. The only way to know for sure is profiling your code in situ.

Finally, all of these methods are in fact incredibly fast. This might be a case of premature optimization. If you have code that concatenates strings a lot, the way to get maximum speed probably has nothing to do with which operators you choose and instead the algorithm you're using!

How about some simple testing? Used the code below:

long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

String a = "a";

String b = "b";

for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) { //ten million times
     String c = a.concat(b);
}

long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

System.out.println(end - start);

• The "a + b" version executed in 2500ms.
• The a.concat(b) executed in 1200ms.

Tested several times. The concat() version execution took half of the time on average.

This result surprised me because the concat() method always creates a new string (it returns a "new String(result)". It's well known that:

String a = new String("a") // more than 20 times slower than String a = "a"

Why wasn't the compiler capable of optimize the string creation in "a + b" code, knowing the it always resulted in the same string? It could avoid a new string creation. If you don't believe the statement above, test for your self.