Hour 24. Performance

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to buffer pages to improve performance

• How to use static content where possible

• How to cache objects to reduce setup time

• How to choose the right session mechanism

• How to precompile JSPs

• How to set the JSP reload time

• Basic Java optimizations that help JSP performance

• How to make JSPs and servlets thread-safe

• How to use thread pools

When you're developing an application, your biggest concern is usually just getting it finished. Software engineering also recommends against "coding for performance" early in the development process. Be careful about doing too much optimization work too early. You need to let the code stabilize before you go in and work on improving its speed or resource allocation. After all, you might make a change that really speeds things up today but makes it difficult to add next week's new set of features.

Sooner or later, however, you have to work on optimizing the performance of the system. There are two parts to performance optimization. There are a few minor things that you should do that you know will help improve performance. After development is complete, or at major milestones during the development cycle, you can do performance testing and isolate areas in which you need to concentrate on optimization.