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Into the mist of serialization myths

Performance myth: serialVersionUID improves Java serialization performance

By Vladimir Roubtsov, JavaWorld.com, 06/27/03

Page 3 of 3

Out of curiosity, I instrumented the java.io.ObjectStreamClass just to see how much time that initial SUID computation takes: this cost turned out to range from 5 to 50 milliseconds in my experiments. This is not a trivial amount to try to save in general, but again, if this is your application's bottleneck, then something is very wrong with your overall design.

The old adage is still true

As it has been said time and time again, you should always profile your application first and optimize the actual hot spots found. Explicitly versioning a class via serialVersionUID requires more code maintenance and is more error prone. There are many valid reasons for using serialVersionUID (protecting against compiler differences, establishing backward serialization compatibility, etc.), but performance is not one of them.

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