Java™ Performance

Foreword

Tuning a Java application can be challenging in today’s large-scale mission-critical world. There are issues to be aware of in everything from the structure of your algorithms, to their memory allocation patterns, to the way they do disk and file I/O. Almost always, the hardest part is figuring out where the issues are. Even (perhaps especially) seasoned practitioners find that their intuitions are wrong. Performance-killing gremlins hide in the most unlikely places.

As Wikipedia says, “Science (from Latin: scientia meaning ‘knowledge’) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.” Performance tuning must be approached as an experimental science: ...