Structures vs Components, an unfair challenge?

A post over in the cf-talk list mentioned that using CreateObject was a lot slower than native datatypes in Coldfusion, well of course it is I thought, but I wanted to see HOW slow they compare, and what the difference would be between them.

So to this aid I did a script that looped, creating objects and timing it, in steps of 50 up to 2000 objects. The code to measure this is as follows:

<cfif fileExists(expandpath("createObject.log"))> <cffile action="delete" file="#expandpath("createObject.log")#"> </cfif>

<!--- lets loop this crazyness--->
<cfloop from="0" to="2000" index="x" step="50">
	
	<!--- arrays to fill--->
	<cfset stArray = ArrayNew(1)>
	<cfset oArray = ArrayNew(1)>
	
	<!--- create a struct --->
	<cfset tStartArray = GetTickCount()>
	<cfloop from="1" to="#x#" index="i">
		<cfset stItem = StructNew()>
		<cfset stItem.name = "Bob" & i>
		<cfset stItem.age = 20>
		 <cfset ArrayAppend(stArray,stItem)> 
	</cfloop>
	<cfset tArrayTotal = GetTickCount() - tStartArray>
	
	<!--- create an component --->
	<cfset tStartObject= GetTickCount()>		
	<cfloop from="1" to="#x#" index="i">
		<cfset oItem = CreateObject('component', 'Person')>
		<cfset oItem.setname("Bob" & i )>
		<cfset oItem.setage(20)>
		 <cfset ArrayAppend(oArray,oItem)> 
	</cfloop>
	<cfset tObjectTotal = GetTickCount() - tStartObject>
	<!--- log the two times for this iteration --->
	<cffile action="append" file="#expandpath("createObject.log")#" output="#x#,#tArrayTotal#,#tObjectTotal#">
</cfloop> </code>

I added some timing info after each iteration and was adding the objects (a struct and a simple Person component) to a log file.

So you dont think that the Person component is very heavy, I did the barest component possible, you might even say its Duck-like!

<cfset this.name = arguments.name> </cffunction>

	<cffunction name="setAge">
		<cfargument name="age">
		<cfset this.age = arguments.age>
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>	 </code>

The results for the component are pretty uniform, but what surprised me was how little speed it takes to create structures. Obviously this is the case, since they are basically a HashMap and in ColdFusion a very long running primitive (i.e. been around a while and optimised)

These results of course are of course unfair, you wouldnt create 2000 odd objects, you might create 5-10 of them as services and keep them cached, but what about beans?

Here is the chart of the results: