Java Performance Tuning

Performance Checklist

• Consider performance at each stage of the development cycle.

  • Plan for tuning phases.

  • Leave code tuning until after the code is functional and debugged.

  • Consider how a particular performance change will affect other parts of the application.

  • Identify performance limitations.

  • Eliminate performance conflicts.

  • Consider how the performance scales as the application scales.

  • Consider how the performance scales as the application load varies.

• Determine the general characteristics of the application in the analysis and design phases.

  • Minimize the features in the requirements.

  • Specify performance boundaries and goals.

  • Consider the numbers, sizes, and sources of objects, data, and other parameters of the application.

  • Create an abstract model of the application to identify any performance problems.

  • Design applets to engage the user as soon as possible.

  • Identify and focus on the performance costs of shared resources.

  • Target decoupling, indirection, abstraction, and extra layers in the design.

  • Predict the performance of design elements that block, copy, queue, or distribute.

  • Consider alternative designs that bypass or reduce high performance costs.

  • Avoid transactions where possible.

  • Minimize transaction time where transactions are necessary.

  • Lock only where the design absolutely requires it.

  • Design parallelism into the application wherever possible. Identify what cannot be parallelized.

  • Watch out for too much parallelism. There are diminishing returns from parallelism overheads.

  • Balance workloads. ...