Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: web services, performance checklist, profiling tools, Socket Socket, Value Object, Search Trees (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Java Peformance Tuning, 2nd edition provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide to eliminating all types of performance problems. Using many real-life examples to work through the tuning process in detail, JPT shows how tricks such as minimizing object creation and replacing strings with arrays can really pay off in improving your code's performance. Tuning J2EE applications bears many similarities to tuning J2SE apps, but important and specific considerations apply. For this reason, Java Performance Tuning, Second Edition includes four new chapters: a new chapter on J2EE application tuning in general followed by chapters on tuning JDBC, servlets and JSPs, and EJBs. Java Performance Tuning offers common-sense advice about what to tune and what to leave alone, emphasizing techniques that provide big performance gains with minimal code restructuring. It gives you crucial guidance that helps you tune without destroying your program's architecture. Blindly changing things in an effort to make a program run faster is a great way to create buggy, unmaintainable code. Java Performance Tuning teaches you to work efficiently and effectively, resulting in code that is robust, maintainable, and fast.

About the Author

Shirazi is an independent consultant. He has spent many years tuning smalltalk applications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 2 edition (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003773
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003777
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,708 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended, December 6, 2000

By	Jason Conner (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Java Performance Tuning (Paperback)

The book ranges rather widely, covering a huge number of tuning details. The author seems to know hands-on performance tuning very well, and many of the examples were directly applicable to our own development. There is only one chapter on designing for performance (I would have liked more), but in that chapter he did identify precisely the issues that we encountered in our project. The example of double sorting internationalized text transferred directly to our project and speeded up a crucial area of our presentation. I do recommend this book, but do not expect a design book. This is strongly hands-on performance tuning.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provides ideas on tactical optimization for performance gain, November 2, 2005

By	Manish Singla (Denver, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book provides good ideas on tactical optimization for performance gain but could have also covered architectural patterns and process for performance optimization.
This book covers the areas of optimizing compilers, I/O, RAM footprint, small object management and deployment etc.

Next edition may also cover architectural decisions (or patterns) which are costly to reverse later. Also, coverage on processes for performance optimization will be great in next edition. Getting a program to run faster costs money, and thus this business decision should have process ( or guidelines for series of high level actions ) to facilitate the optimization.

Other things, I would like to cover in next edition are
1) How to choose between "speed up the slow things" or "do the slow things less often".
2) How to identify ACTUAL areas of improvement. i.e. Importance of automated run that reasonably simulates the program under its usual conditions. (Example, our test on performance gave excellent results. But European customers rejected the product because we had not simulated ocean hop of packets as 2 databases were in America. Or importance of using a multi-user simulation system to identify real problems i.e. transaction interactions etc).
3) Importance of cohesive, loosely coupled and well factored modules for behaviour-preserving transformations of performance.
4) Importance of measurement before starting optimization.

Anyway, great book.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Criticisms invalid, January 16, 2001

By	John M. Harby "John" (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Java Performance Tuning (Paperback)

I fail to understand the prior critical messages. One said that the author didn't present an accurate description of Reference objects. Well, the description starting on page 108 matches the one I was given by Sun in their performance workshop I attended in Mountain View. So I guess Sun does not know what they are doing in terms of Reference objects :).

Another message claimed that this book was not useful for enterprise applications. To the contrary, I was very impressed with the way he covered the actual process of doing performance analysis, he didn't just present a bunch of individual tips. Many people neglect this in enterprise development - they spend a bunch of time eyeballing the code and trying to do some quick fixes when they really need to set up a harness and do some serious testing.