In Tiger beta 2 build 40 there seems to be a major performance regression in javadoc on some classes. I am not sure what about these classes exactly causes the problem, but it is easily reproducible (and the long pauses always occur in the same places). I am using

  http://www.netbeans.org/source/browse/openide/src/

as a test case, but I have observed the same slowdown on other source trees as well.

Using b39, as in previous releases incl. JDK 1.4.2, the command

time $JDKHOME/bin/javadoc -sourcepath /space/src/nb_all/openide/src -d /tmp/javadocout -source 1.4 org.openide org.openide.actions org.openide.awt org.openide.cookies org.openide.explorer org.openide.explorer.propertysheet org.openide.explorer.propertysheet.editors org.openide.explorer.view org.openide.filesystems org.openide.modules org.openide.nodes org.openide.options org.openide.text org.openide.util org.openide.util.actions org.openide.util.datatransfer org.openide.util.enum org.openide.util.io org.openide.util.lookup org.openide.windows org.openide.xml

runs fairly smoothly (produces messages saying what it is doing at a reasonable speed) and completes in about 26 seconds on my machine. (RH 9 Linux, 2.4.20 kernel, UTF-8 default locale, glibc 2.3.2, 1.2Ghz Pentium, 1Gb RAM.)

Using b40, the same command takes three and a half minutes! (8x slowdown)

The first significant pause is after the line

Generating /tmp/javadocout/org/openide/awt//Actions.CheckboxMenuItem.html...

and before the line

Generating /tmp/javadocout/org/openide/awt//Actions.MenuItem.html...

You can see this source code if you like:

http://www.netbeans.org/source/browse/openide/src/org/openide/awt/Actions.java?rev=1.93&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

It seems that there is a huge pause when generating the Javadoc for any class which extends javax.swing.JComponent directly or indirectly, and to a lesser extend java.awt.Component - I presume the key is the number of superclasses (or inherited methods or something).

I will attach a sequence of thread dumps taken about every two seconds while b40 runs javadoc on these sources. You can see that most of the time is spent inside one method: com.sun.tools.doclets.internal.toolkit.util.Util.matches.

###@###.### 2004-05-16