On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Sean Owen <sro...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... which further leads me to comment that the *best* way of > approaching all this would be to implement Serializable correctly. > Then generically create one Writable wrapper that leverages > Serializable to do its work. Then we have everything implemented > nicely. You can use Vectors in any context that leverages standard > serialization -- which is a big deal, for example, in J2EE. > > I stand by that until someone points out why this won't work or is > slow or something at runtime; don't see it yet. >
I've seen that Java's serialization mechanism through ObjectInput/ObjectOutputStream tends to be slower and more memory-intensive than hand-rolled serialization with writing to ByteBuffers or byte[]. A part of that may be just the way the Java default mechanism handles allocating memory and moving the data around, but the use of reflection and the verbosity of built-in serialization are certainly factors. In one case, hand-rolled serialization resulted in a 10x performance improvement over ObjectOutput/ObjectInput plumbed into ByteArray(I/O)Streams. That doesn't mean one shouldn't attempt to implement Serializable for convenience. I just wanted to make a point about the runtime performance. Drew
