Why is if (variable1 % variable2 == 0) inefficient?

Question

I am new to java, and was running some code last night, and this really bothered me. I was building a simple program to display every X outputs in a for loop, and I noticed a MA

Answer 1

In follow-up to @phuclv comment, I checked the code generated by JIT¹, the results are as follows:

for variable % 5000 (division by constant):

mov     rax,29f16b11c6d1e109h
imul    rbx
mov     r10,rbx
sar     r10,3fh
sar     rdx,0dh
sub     rdx,r10
imul    r10,rdx,0c350h    ; <-- imul
mov     r11,rbx
sub     r11,r10
test    r11,r11
jne     1d707ad14a0h

for variable % variable:

mov     rax,r14
mov     rdx,8000000000000000h
cmp     rax,rdx
jne     22ccce218edh
xor     edx,edx
cmp     rbx,0ffffffffffffffffh
je      22ccce218f2h
cqo
idiv    rax,rbx           ; <-- idiv
test    rdx,rdx
jne     22ccce218c0h

Because division always takes longer than multiplication, the last code snippet is less performant.

Java version:

java version "11" 2018-09-25
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11+28)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11+28, mixed mode)

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^{1 - VM options used: -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:CompileCommand=print,src/java/Main.main}