Java if vs. try/catch overhead

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I know you’re asking about performance overhead, but you really should not use try/catch and if interchangeably.

try/catch is for things that go wrong that are outside of your control and not in the normal program flow. For example, trying to write to a file and the file system is full? That situation should typically be handled with try/catch.

if statements should be normal flow and ordinary error checking. So, for example, user fails to populate a required input field? Use if for that, not try/catch.

It seems to me that your example code strongly suggests that the correct approach there is an if statement and not a try/catch.

To answer your question, I would surmise that there is generally more overhead in a try/catch than an if. To know for sure, get a Java profiler and find out for the specific code you care about. It’s possible that the answer may vary depending on the situation.

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