I was looking at a performance thread last year: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=111892021000001&r=1&w=2 "Performance difference between 1.6.1 and 1.6.4 (in eclipse)"
There was a performance slowdown between ant 1.6.1 and ant 1.6.4 For script1 I get the following numbers: ANT 1.6.1 => 11 sec ANT 1.6.4 => 32 sec For script2 I get the following numbers: ANT 1.6.1 => 34 sec ANT 1.6.4 => 1 min 16 sec on discussion it was also noticed that there was a performance slowdown between ant 1.6.2 and ant 1.6.5 Timing by tasks in Ant 1.6.2: in Ant 1.6.5 ----------- ------ ------ ---------- ----------- ------ 19.578,0 ms 175,2% 24x antcall 62.235,0 ms 189,0% 5.638,0 ms 50,5% 434x see.get 6.308,0 ms 19,2% 1.957,0 ms 17,5% 25x import 14.238,0 ms 43,2% 1.269,0 ms 11,4% 15131x property 11.775,0 ms 35,8% 563,0 ms 5,0% 43x delete 608,0 ms 1,8% 93,0 ms 0,8% 101x dirname 221,0 ms 0,7% 47,0 ms 0,4% 1x tstamp 47,0 ms 0,1% 30,0 ms 0,3% 25x presetdef 16,0 ms 0,0% 15,0 ms 0,1% 430x basename 453,0 ms 1,4% 0,0 ms 0,0% 78x mkdir 64,0 ms 0,2% 11.172,0 ms 100,0% 1x TOTAL 32.922,0 ms 100,0% I do not know the build files used for this test. There was a number of fixes for performance since ant 1.6.5 in particular: http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=37184 So I decided to investigate the current performance. This resulted in a number of performance fixes that I commited yesterday. I also wrote a small testing build file - placed in src/etc/performance/build.xml this creates two build files, one contains lots of property tasks as follows <target ..> <property name="pro1" value="val"/> <property name="pro2" value="val"/> ,,,,, the other contains a lot of <antcall>'s. and nothing else. There are then run with the different versions of ant; The results are as follows: do-times: c:/svn/ant/trunk/dist -- props.xml --: Total time: 2 seconds -- ant-call.xml --: Total time: 10 seconds c:/apps/apache-ant-1.7.0Beta2 -- props.xml --: Total time: 7 seconds -- ant-call.xml --: Total time: 49 seconds c:/apps/apache-ant-1.6.5 -- props.xml --: Total time: 36 seconds -- ant-call.xml --: Total time: 35 seconds c:/apps/apache-ant-1.6.2 -- props.xml --: Total time: 6 seconds -- ant-call.xml --: Total time: 37 seconds c:/apps/apache-ant-1.5.4 -- props.xml --: Total time: 3 minutes 11 seconds -- ant-call.xml --: Total time: 1 minute 42 seconds We need to have more test files for other features (directory scanning and file coping for example). Peter