Re: Performance question

From:

Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 09 May 2007 11:50:15 +0200

Message-ID:

<5adjq9F2ok02mU1@mid.individual.net>

On 08.05.2007 22:08, Jordi wrote:

I am building a client-server application.
I need to send and receive information in both sides, and do some
computing with it in both sides.

So I will build a custom protocol for that.
I have these options:

1) Send and receive objects that contain the info.
2) Send text, and cut it in pieces that will be stored in a temporal
object so I can deal with the information easier. Then destroy the
object after that.
3) Deal all time with text. This may make the code very complex.

Basically, some people told me that solytion 1 can make some loose of
performance, as text is faster to transmit than objects.
The solution 3 can be a pain, but I am not very worried, as I will be
the only one that reads my code.

I think 2 is the best, as I will be able to transmit info fast and
will use a temporal object just to handle easy the information.

All time I will send and receive byte arrays by NIO.

Why don't you use RMI?

My question has to deal about knowing if I loose bandwith or CPU
cycles more or less if I do 1, 2 or 3.

When using binary streams or RMI, I'd use #1 as serializing and
deserializing a complex object is likely faster than parsing it yourself
from text.

Another note: if you encapsulate the communication reasonable well you
can easily change the communication means later without affecting other
code.

Having said that I'd start with the easiest (i.e. let Java do what it
can do for you) and only change it if there are performance issues with
this. It is likely though that network communication times dominate
performance and exchanging the marshalling and demarshalling code
doesn't make a significant difference.

Kind regards

robert