next Quality Assurance
up Performance Considerations
previous Intrinsic Performance Issues
  Contents
PDF version   PostScript version

Extrinsic Performance Issues

A great strength of the language is its simplicity. Or more truthfully, it is very easy to write inefficient code in Java. A more thorough understanding of the language is however necessary to devise reasonably efficient code.
For instance, the Vector class, which is probably the most widely used collection class, is thread-safe (i.e. declared synchronized). The protection mechanism has a performance cost that may of course be justified in a multi-threaded environment, but not in a purely sequential programme path. The ArrayList class, in all other respects equivalent to the Vector class, is not synchronized.
next Quality Assurance
up Performance Considerations
previous Intrinsic Performance Issues
  Contents

Copyright © 2001 Jean-Marc Rosengard