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Performance books put to the test

Tune up your Java programs with the help of these Java books

By John Zukowski, JavaWorld.com, 03/23/01

Many people complain about the performance of their Java programs. Expecting miracles, or just giving in to hype, they want unoptimized programs to perform faster than natively C/C++-compiled code. I don't mean to say that everyone writes poorly written code, but unoptimized code is often less than perfect and can be tweaked to run faster while still being maintainable. In this article, I'll examine six Java books that explore ways to help you improve your Java programs' performance.

The six books are:

  • Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics, Steve Wilson and Jeff Kesselman (Addison-Wesley, January 2000)
  • Java Performance Tuning, Jack Shirazi (O'Reilly & Associates, September 2000)
  • Enterprise Java Performance, Steven Halter and Steven Munroe (Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems Press, August 2000)
  • Java Performance and Scalability, Volume 1: Server-Side Programming Techniques, Dov Bulka (Addison-Wesley, June 2000)
  • Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide, Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie (Prentice Hall, August 1999)
  • Practical Java Programming Language Guide, Peter Haggar (Addison-Wesley, February 2000)


Table 1 provides a quick look at the books' main characteristics. The first two rows should be self-explanatory. The remaining rows describe the books' coverage of improving performance in different Java technology areas.

Table 1: Performance books overview
  Java Platform Performance Java Performance Tuning Enterprise Java Performance Java Performance and Scalability Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide Practical Java
Price 4.95 4.95 9.99 4.95 9.99 2.95
Total Pages 230 430 410 290 300 280
CD-ROM/Source from Web No / Yes No / Yes No / Yes No / Yes No / No No / Yes
Tuning Overview Good Very Good Good Poor Average None
Coding Techniques Average Good Poor Average Good Very Good
Object Loading Good Average None Average Average Average
Data Structures Good Very Good Poor Average* Average Average
Threads Poor* Very Good Poor Good Average* Good
GUIs Good Poor None None None None
I/O Average Good Poor Average Average Average
Distributed Computing None Good Very Good Very Good Poor None
JNI Good None None Average None None
Scale: None, Poor, Average, Good, Very Good
A star (*) in a field means the review of the specific book provides further details of the ranking.


Now I'll review each book individually. The order in which I review them is random and not based on their rankings. Beside each book's title is a star rating that is based on the level of coverage and depth of techniques regarding Java performance tuning. One star is a poor rating; the highest rating (five stars) indicates exceptional coverage.

Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics

star star star star



At only 230 pages -- the smallest of the bunch -- Java Platform Performance tries to pack lots of tips into a small amount of space. It does an excellent job, if your needs match the topics covered. Most readers should have an interest in a majority of the topics.

The book is divided nicely into two parts: one has information on the strategies involved in increasing performance, the other explains the tactics necessary to implement those strategies. Two in-depth appendices describe garbage collection and HotSpot. The garbage-collection chapter focuses mostly on the object life cycle, including a nice description of reference objects; the HotSpot chapter compares optimization techniques that HotSpot uses and the techniques you can use in your code.

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