java.util.Pattern vs regular string search

Following discussion at work where I took a role of advocate of regular expressions I decided to verify how they are really fast. I remember that I have read that once Pattern is compiled (that might take some time) it works as quickly as regular string search. So, I wrote test that calls 1 million times String.contains() and Pattern.matcher().find(). Here are the results: contains test took 102 ms while pattern test took 340.


This means that patterns are almost 3.5 times slower. Therefore although regular expressions provide very convenient way for searching within strings sometimes when pattern are very simple and code is very performance critical we should use the good old methods provided by class java.lang.String.

With that I have to say that I paid attention that method indexOf() accepts String, method contains() accepts CharSequence but is implemented as  

return indexOf(s.toString())>=0. 

Pattern at the same time works directly with CharSequence. This means that if you use StringBuilder you should be careful passing StringBuilder instance  as an argument to String methods: creating new String object may cause significant performance degradation.