Java Performance Tuning

Message Reduction

Let’s look at a simple example of reducing message calls. For later infrastructure comparison, we will use three different distributed-application infrastructures, CORBA , RMI, and a proprietary distribution mechanism using plain sockets and serialization (see Proprietary Communications Infrastructures). In the example, I present a simple server object that supports only three instance variables and three methods to set those instance variables.

Proprietary Communications Infrastructures

You can easily create your own communication mechanisms by connecting two processes using standard sockets. Creating two-way connections with Socket s and ServerSockets is very straightforward. For basic communication, you decide on your own communication protocol, possibly using serialization to handle passing objects across the communication channel.

However, using proprietary communications is not a wise thing to do, and can be a severe maintenance overhead unless your communication and distribution requirements are simple. I occasionally use proprietary communications for testing purposes and for comparison against other communications infrastructures, as I have done in this chapter.

In this chapter, I use a simple generic communication infrastructure that automatically handles remotely invoking methods: basically, a stripped-down version of RMI. I generate a server skeleton and client proxy using reflection to identify all the public methods of the distributable class. Then ...