Java™ Performance and Scalability, Volume 1: Server-Side Programming Techniques

Chapter 2. Pure Overhead

Performance optimization often has to strike a delicate balance between competing forces. This is perhaps why it is referred to as optimization as opposed to performance maximization. Performance optimization often requires the sacrifice of some other software goal. Important goals such as flexibility, maintainability, cost, and reuse must often give way to the demand for performance. It is unusual when a performance fix, in an otherwise high-quality piece of code, does not compromise any other software development goals. Sometimes we are fortunate when the elimination of simple coding mistakes results in higher performance without any sacrifice. The optimizations we discuss in this chapter fall into this category. They ...