ValidationException performance cost

[rpolyano]

Hello,

I'm using this library to validate elements against a large schema (https://www.hl7.org/fhir/downloads.html - https://www.hl7.org/fhir/fhir.schema.json.zip). We noticed a significant (almost 10x!) performance cost when using the validator in our program - mostly because our program has a large-ish stack (or maybe there is some other aspect, other than size of our stack that is causing problems, like asynchronicity) when it does validation, so java.lang.Throwable#fillInStackTrace takes a "long time" to run. Forking the code, and adding

@Override
public synchronized Throwable fillInStackTrace() {
  return this;
}

to ValidationException improves performance by almost 10x in our specific application.

Obviously this is not likely to be a good permanent solution (there are probably scenarios where the stack is useful) but being able to trigger this behaviour behind a flag or something would be ideal.

What do y'all think? Is this something we can optimize in the library, or maybe externally at the callsite?

[erosb]

Hello @rpolyano, this is a very cool idea. Implemented in 41dcbd3

The ValidationException thrown back to the library caller still contains a proper stacktrace, but for the internally caught exceptions it is suppressed in the way you suggested.

[rpolyano]

Fantastic, thank you! Hopefully this improves performance for others too.

[erosb]

This is now fixed and released in version 1.12.0.
@grahamegrieve you may also be interested in this, it can speed up your build process.

[grahamegrieve]

thx