Yup, and sun.misc.BASE64Decoder is way slower: 9x slower than java.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter.parseBase64Binary() and 4x slower than org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64.decodeBase64(), at least for a small string on Java 6 OSX.
Below is the test program I used. With Java 1.6.0_43 on OSX:
john:password = am9objpwYXNzd29yZA==
javax.xml took 373: john:password
apache took 612: john:password
sun took 2215: john:password
Btw that's with commons-codec 1.4. With 1.7 it seems to get slower:
javax.xml took 377: john:password
apache took 1681: john:password
sun took 2197: john:password
Didn't test Java 7 or other OS.
import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;
import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;
import java.io.IOException;
public class TestBase64 {
private static volatile String save = null;
public static void main(String argv[]) {
String teststr = "john:password";
String b64 = DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary(teststr.getBytes());
System.out.println(teststr + " = " + b64);
try {
final int COUNT = 1000000;
long start;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i=0; i<COUNT; ++i) {
save = new String(DatatypeConverter.parseBase64Binary(b64));
}
System.out.println("javax.xml took "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start)+": "+save);
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i=0; i<COUNT; ++i) {
save = new String(Base64.decodeBase64(b64));
}
System.out.println("apache took "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start)+": "+save);
sun.misc.BASE64Decoder dec = new sun.misc.BASE64Decoder();
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i=0; i<COUNT; ++i) {
save = new String(dec.decodeBuffer(b64));
}
System.out.println("sun took "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start)+": "+save);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e);
}
}
}