With the exception of some common sense situations, I think that performance optimizations carry the ability to pollute an API and mangle the internal code. Garbage collection is improving, JVMs are getting faster... I'd prefer clean, maintainable code over that which goes to extremes to save a few milliseconds.
Measurements are a necessity for this sort of thing. I think the problem has to be proven before the solution is started. There's a nice profiler plugin for Eclipse that I've used a few times, it seems to do the job.
Gary Gregory wrote:
Hi,
I am always very weary of doing anything in the name of performance without any measurements based on a real usage scenario. Old motto on performance improvements: First, don't' do it. Second, think about it, then don't do it. ;-)
I think it would be interesting to discuss this if/when the post read like: "In our app x, we've measured with JProbe (or whatever) a bottleneck in this and that place were 80% of the time for a set of tasks is spent in FooBuilder.doThisOrThat()."
There are two kinds of performance: speed and memory usage. Here we are
talking about creating code to change the profile and balance of these two
aspects based on a hunch. I have been to many performance talks (JavaOne)
where one hears things like (paraphrasing): "in an extreme case, we had this
customer try such and such performance improvements of caching this and that
in memory which effectively negated GC from collecting anything and led to a
different kind of memory leak (a.k.a unwanted object retention) and
performance degradation due to virtual memory swapping".
From the POV of client code, this seems like quite a complication to deal
with, especially when considering MT issues.
Without talking sides on the details of this particular issue, when designing an API, you also have to consider what choices you'll give client code. At which point will the client code writer scratch his head with a "there are so many ways of doing the same thing, which one is best and when?". It is best if all of these choices are documented.
Gary
-----Original Message----- From: Stephen Colebourne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 13:03 To: Jakarta Commons Users List Subject: Re: [lang] Reusable Builder classes
Possible I suppose. I guess I don't have strong views either for or against.
Any other [lang] committers have any views?
Stephen
----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Forbes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I find the Builder classes really helpful, but find it wasteful having to create a new HashCodeBuilder, CompareToBuilder or EqualsBuilder for each invocation of a hashCode, equals or compareTo method. In some situations, such as a sort of a large collection, these methods can end up being called often, thus imposing a high garbage collection overhead.
I am thinking of something analogous to StringBuffer, which can be reset for reuse by simply calling setLength(0).
How about a simple reset() method, with no parameters, that just resets the internal state (e.g. the variable "comparison" in the case of CompareToBuilder) to its initial value? (Possibly also a getter to determine whether the builder is currently in a reusable state.)
Granted, this would require the Builder to be an instance variable of the calling object rather than a local variable, thus raising issues of thread safety. Unfortunately using sychronized methods has something of a bad name for performance. In my understanding and experience this is an unfair reputation, and my guess is that the overhead would be amply compensated for by the savings in garbage collection. But short of this, provided the caller is given the responsibility for synchronising access to the object in a multithreading scenario, I don't see a problem.
Any thoughts?
Don
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