Reviews for Java Performance Tuning

1. Awesome book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2004

   This is an excellent book, with something like 300 tuning techniques covered. Some techniques are more hairy than others, but the breadth and depth is astonishing. I did extensive research before buying this book. I found that it was in the top 3 editors choice for Java book at Javaworld a couple of times, in the top 20 Java books readers choice at JDJ a couple of times (note that is all "Java" books, not "Java Performance" books), it was the choice of a comparative review of Java performance books, it had good reviews by every professional review I could find, and finally, after having read it, it is one of the few Java books I keep handy as a reference.

2. Disappointed

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2003

   I never thought that I would feel so let down by an O’Reilly book. This one made me feel like "QinetiQ". I was looking for something as useful as O’Reilly’s Oracle performance tuning book and more up-to-date than Sun's "Enterprise Java Performance". No, I found a book full of a mix of useless examples and pathetic rhetoric.
   The author likes telling you about C - I don’t care about C, I’ve got a 3000-class java application suite to tune.
   If you're at the stage where you need to re-write “java.lang.Object” then you don't need this book - you need "C for dummies".
   His examples range from “Hey Look I Can Write Faster Code Than Sun!” to “But don’t run this example because it’s not polite to”.
   I manage a team of programmers and I can't recommend this book to them. Hey - if you haven't read Sun's excellent "Effective Java" don't bother going near this book.
   I only give this as much as two stars because of discussion of the 2-Ronnies compression algorithm example: "F U NE X?".
   There are better books on the subject, or at least ones that will be of use to you.

3. Fun and informative

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, March 12nd, 2003

   Once the business rules have been settled and all that is left is to tune the code, then the fun starts. Like a race car mechanic trying to squeeze out a couple of extra MPH from a race car, the most fun in programming is to try squeeze out extra performance from some code. A book on performance tuning should understand that and make the topic fun. Reading this book it is clear that Jack Shirazi loves to tune code. He has done an incredible amount of detailed research on different JVMs to determine exactly how to make Java perform. But he is also practical. He explains how to find performance problems, which exact areas to concentrate on, and which areas to ignore. After reading this book you won't waste your time on areas of code that can't be easily optimized and instead you'll know how to concentrate on those places where you can get the most bang. The book has been updated from the earlier edition to bring all the information up to date with the latest JVMs. Best of all, an additional 250 pages has been added to the book covering J2EE including Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, and JDBC. "Java Performance Tuning" is a programmer's book. You are guaranteed to learn a lot of very neat and useful tricks. I doubt that there is another Java book on the market with as many "WOW!" moments in it. Buy it and watch your code zoom.

4. Excellent coverage of a complex topic

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, January 12nd, 2003

   You have been working on that Java application for two weeks and it's finally ready for testing. Your window for having the web site down is ten minutes but you aren't concerned. Three hours later with the program still running, you are more than concerned. Before you panic, pick up a copy of "Java Performance Tuning". This book is geared for serious developers who need to dramatically improve performance in their applications and are willing to dig deep into the code. For example, writing your own customized Reader and byte-to-char converter can be ten times faster than using the BufferedReader class. Shirazi starts off by showing how to measure performance and identify bottlenecks, including a way to override the Object class to measure object creation. Subsequent chapters discuss key performance issues and possible solutions. Topics covered include replacing Strings with char arrays, eliminating casting and minimizing object creation, removing method calls from inside of loops, writing your own sort routines instead of using Arrays.sort(), identifying the correct Collection object, using threading to improve performance, and optimizing distributed systems to decrease network communication. As Shirazi explains, some of the methods covered may violate encapsulation or other OO techniques so they should only be used when performance has been identified as a critical problem. Besides being well written, the book is fun. I found myself trying to figure out along with the author how to improve the performance of the various examples demonstrated in the book.

5. Good and concise book

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, January 12st, 2003

   I like this book... as author focused to solve general issues in real world to get the performance.
   I like that the book provides information in a well laid out, structured fashion.
   good book and provides good food for thought.
   this is not good for serious performance tuning so one may need other reference