Java Performance Tips 2

Introduction

We talked about Strings operations in the last article, now we will talk about more tips on performance tips, we will talk about the importance of creating stateless methods and class if your logic doesn't depend on the state of the object, also we will talk about object reusing and how will affect the performance by reducing the headache of garbage collection.

Take 'State or Stateless' Decision

Creating and destroying objects issue in java can cause performance issues, for example creating State classes for stateless data; a stateless class means that the data of the created object doesn't depend on the state where there is no fields or attributes that makes an object differs from other.

We can imagine that the Stateless class can say 'Use me only if your code doesn't depend on your object state, All the objects are functionally equivalent to me, you will gain besides that no creation of objects, the CPU will be happy of doing that J'

Code Example

The following StatelessClassWithoutStaticMethods class has a method called execute, where the logic of this method doesn't depend on the state of the object, while it is not static method.

package performancetest.episode2;

public class StatelessClassWithoutStaticMethods {

      public void execute()

      {

            // the logic here doesn't depend on the object state

            for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {

                  System.out.println(i);

            }

      }

}

While the right version as the following:

package performancetest.episode2;

public class StatelessClassWithStaticMethods {

      public static void execute()

      {

            // the logic here doesn't depend on the object state

            for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {

                  System.out.println(i);

            }

      }

}

Performance Analysis

Using TBTB (Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project), the following results are shown as follows

Performance Analysis

Based on this figure, the static execute method has loss approximately 18% of time from the non-static one.

That doesn't mean that you have to make all the class a static (i.e. a class has static methods only), but if you have a state method in this class depends on the object state, make this method only non-static.

Don't Create A New One If You Can What You Have

'You can use me before I go to the garbage collection, clear my data and reuse me again; we want to lessen the work on our friend garbage collection' Any object says this quote J, Creating new objects is expensive as we know as more objects we create, the garbage collection job will be more time consuming.

So if you have a chance to reuse the object again without creating a new one of the same type, do it immediately, it will improve the performance and will make the garbage collection job be easier.

Code Example

public static void fillVectorDataWithoutRecycling()

      {

            for (int i = 0 ; i < 1000 ; i ++)

            {

                  Vector v = new Vector();

                  v.add("item1");

                  v.add("item2");

                  v.add("item3");

                  System.out.println(v.get(0));

            }

      }

     

      public static void fillVectorDataWithRecycling()

      {

            Vector v = new Vector();

            for (int i = 0 ; i < 1000 ; i ++)

            {

                  v.clear();

                  v.add("item1");

                  v.add("item2");

                  v.add("item3");

                  System.out.println(v.get(0));

            }

      }

We have two methods, fillVectorDataWithoutRecycling method creates a new vector object in the loop, while fillVectorDataWithRecycling method uses one vector object and clears the vector object and reuse it.

Performance Analysis

Performance Analysis With/Without Vector Recycling

From this figure we found that reusing the current object will cause loss approximately 50% of time (of course without taking in the consideration the hardware architecture like CPU, cache and memory).