new SocketPermission("foo", actions) has gotten much slower compared with 1.3. The culprit seems to be the calls to Inet6Address.textToNumericFormat and Inet4Address.textToNumericFormat. Both of these methods call String.getBytes() and cons up another byte[] array, even if the src string is not numeric. String.getBytes() in particular seems quite expensive, and appears to be the main cause of the slowdown. For the normal case, it appears that it would be much faster to use String.charAt.