Java Theory and Practice: Anatomy of a Flawed Microbenchmark

By Brian Goetz
2005-04-27


Is There Any Other Kind?
Software engineers are notoriously obsessed, sometimes excessively, with performance. While sometimes performance is the most important requirement in a software project, as it might be when developing protocol routing software for a high-speed switch, most of the time performance needs to be balanced against other requirements, such as functionality, reliability, maintainability, extensibility, time to market, and other business and engineering considerations. In this month's Java theory and practice, columnist Brian Goetz explores why it is so much harder to measure the performance of Java language constructs than it looks. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the accompanying discussion forum. (You can also click Discuss at the top or bottom of the article to access the forum.)

Even when performance is not a key requirement, or even a stated requirement, of the project you're working on, it is often difficult to ignore performance concerns, because you may think that would make you a "bad engineer." Toward the end of writing high-performance code, developers often write small benchmark programs to measure the relative performance of one approach against another. Unfortunately, as you learned in December's installment "Dynamic compilation and performance management", assessing the performance of a given idiom or construct in the Java language is far harder than it is in other, statically compiled languages.

Tutorial Pages:
» Is There Any Other Kind?
» A Flawed Microbenchmark
» Benchmark Code Doesn't Look Like Real Code
» Ask the Wrong Question, Get the Wrong Answer
» How to Write a Perfect Microbenchmark
» Resources


First published by IBM developerWorks

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