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Make Java fast: Optimize!

How to get the greatest performance out of your code through low-level optimizations in Java -- complete with a Benchmark applet

By Doug Bell, JavaWorld.com, 04/09/97

According to the pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Any article on optimization must start by pointing out that there are usually more reasons not to optimize than to optimize.

• If your code already works, optimizing it is a sure way to introduce new, and possibly subtle, bugs
  
  
• Optimization tends to make code harder to understand and maintain
  
  
• Some of the techniques presented here increase speed by reducing the extensibility of the code
  
  
• Optimizing code for one platform may actually make it worse on another platform
  
  
• A lot of time can be spent optimizing, with little gain in performance, and can result in obfuscated code
  
  
• If you're overly obsessed with optimizing code, people will call you a nerd behind your back
  
  

Before optimizing, you should carefully consider whether you need to optimize at all. Optimization in Java can be an elusive target since the execution environments vary. Using a better algorithm probably will yield a bigger performance increase than any amount of low-level optimizations and is more likely to deliver an improvement under all execution conditions. As a rule, high-level optimizations should be considered before doing low-level optimizations.

So why optimize?

If it's such a bad idea, why optimize at all? Well, in an ideal world you wouldn't. But the reality is that sometimes the biggest problem with a program is that it requires simply too many resources, and these resources (memory, CPU cycles, network bandwidth, or a combination) may be limited. Code fragments that occur multiple times throughout a program are likely to be size-sensitive, while code with many execution iterations may be speed-sensitive.

Make Java fast!

As an interpreted language with a compact bytecode, speed, or the lack of it, is what most often pops up as a problem in Java. We'll primarily look at how to make Java run faster rather than making it fit into a smaller space -- although we'll point out where and how these approaches affect memory or network bandwidth. The focus will be on the core language rather than on the Java APIs.

By the way, one thing we won't discuss here is the use of native methods written in C or assembly. While using native methods can give the ultimate performance boost, it does so at the cost of Java's platform independence. It is possible to write both a Java version of a method and native versions for selected platforms; this leads to increased performance on some platforms without giving up the ability to run on all platforms. But this is all I'm going to say on the subject of replacing Java with C code. (See the Java Tip, "Write native methods" for more information on this topic.) Our focus in this article is on how to make Java fast.

90/10, 80/20, hut, hut, hike!

As a rule, 90 percent of a program's excution time is spent executing 10 percent of the code. (Some people use the 80 percent/20 percent rule, but my experience writing and optimizing commercial games in several languages for the last 15 years has shown that the 90 percent/10 percent formula is typical for performance-hungry programs since few tasks tend to be performed with great frequency.) Optimizing the other 90 percent of the program (where 10 percent of the execution time was spent) has no noticeable effect on performance. If you were able to make that 90 percent of the code execute twice as fast, the program would only be 5 percent faster. So the first task in optimizing code is to identify the 10 percent (frequently it is less than this) of the program that consumes most of the execution time. This isn't always where you expect it to be.

 

Improve efficiency with Visual Studio(r) 2010 Beta 2. - Microsoft

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