What is the performance cost of having a virtual method in a C++ class?

Having at least one virtual method in a C++ class (or any of its parent classes) means that the class will have a virtual table, and every instance will have a virtual pointer.

So the memory cost is quite clear. The most important is the memory cost on the instances (especially if the instances are small, for example if they are just meant to contain an integer: in this case having a virtual pointer in every instance might double the size of the instances. As for the memory space used up by the virtual tables, I guess it is usually negligible compared to the space used up by the actual method code.

This brings me to my question: is there a measurable performance cost (i.e. speed impact) for making a method virtual? There will be a lookup in the virtual table at runtime, upon every method call, so if there are very frequent calls to this method, and if this method is very short, then there might be a measurable performance hit? I guess it depends on the platform, but has anyone run some benchmarks?

The reason I am asking is that I came across a bug that happened to be due to a programmer forgetting to define a method virtual. This is not the first time I see this kind of mistake. And I thought: why do we add the virtual keyword when needed instead of removing the virtual keyword when we are absolutely sure that it is not needed? If the performance cost is low, I think I will simply recommend the following in my team: simply make every method virtual by default, including the destructor, in every class, and only remove it when you need to. Does that sound crazy to you?

I ran some timings on a 3ghz in-order PowerPC processor. On that architecture, a virtual function call costs 7 nanoseconds longer than a direct (non-virtual) function call.

So, not really worth worrying about the cost unless the function is something like a trivial Get()/Set() accessor, in which anything other than inline is kind of wasteful. A 7ns overhead on a function that inlines to 0.5ns is severe; a 7ns overhead on a function that takes 500ms to execute is meaningless.

The big cost of virtual functions isn't really the lookup of a function pointer in the vtable (that's usually just a single cycle), but that the indirect jump usually cannot be branch-predicted. This can cause a large pipeline bubble as the processor cannot fetch any instructions until the indirect jump (the call through the function pointer) has retired and a new instruction pointer computed. So, the cost of a virtual function call is much bigger than it might seem from looking at the assembly... but still only 7 nanoseconds.

Edit: Andrew, Not Sure, and others also raise the very good point that a virtual function call may cause an instruction cache miss: if you jump to a code address that is not in cache then the whole program comes to a dead halt while the instructions are fetched from main memory. This is always a significant stall: on Xenon, about 650 cycles (by my tests).

However this isn't a problem specific to virtual functions because even a direct function call will cause a miss if you jump to instructions that aren't in cache. What matters is whether the function has been run before recently (making it more likely to be in cache), and whether your architecture can predict static (not virtual) branches and fetch those instructions into cache ahead of time. My PPC does not, but maybe Intel's most recent hardware does.

My timings control for the influence of icache misses on execution (deliberately, since I was trying to examine the CPU pipeline in isolation), so they discount that cost.

There is definitely measurable overhead when calling a virtual function - the call must use the vtable to resolve the address of the function for that type of object. The extra instructions are the least of your worries. Not only do vtables prevent many potential compiler optimizations (since the type is polymorphic the compiler) they can also thrash your I-Cache.

Of course whether these penalties are significant or not depends on your application, how often those code paths are executed, and your inheritance patterns.

In my opinion though, having everything as virtual by default is a blanket solution to a problem you could solve in other ways.

Perhaps you could look at how classes are designed/documented/written. Generally the header for a class should make quite clear which functions can be overridden by derived classes and how they are called. Having programmers write this documentation is helpful in ensuring they are marked correctly as virtual.

I would also say that declaring every function as virtual could lead to more bugs than just forgetting to mark something as virtual. If all functions are virtual everything can be replaced by base classes - public, protected, private - everything becomes fair game. By accident or intention subclasses could then change the behavior of functions that then cause problems when used in the base implementation.