Authoritative and practical, but not for everyone

If you are a core Java developer/architect who does performance tuning on a regular basis this should be part of your library.

Over time, this has been the most useful of the dozen or so performance books I own. It's scope is narrow - core Java tuning and it skates over the distributed computing smells that seem to be the most common cause of hot spots in today's Java apps. The author isn't afraid to describe unorthodox or ugly tricks when they can bear fruit. The custom Class object that seemed to offend some reviewers helped me track down a gnarly memory issue in an app that was too bloated for OptimizeIt to be practical. Doing the "wrong thing" to get the "right result" can be the essence of pragmatism. The section on StringTokenizer implementation is a great example of unpicking a typical performance issue from inappropriate use of a general purpose class.

Performance tuning is a specialty that demands pragmatism, confidence, persistence, creativity and a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. I suspect that only a minority of the population of competent developers have the necessary assortment of personailty quirks to be effective performance engineers. Black and white thinking, sometimes a trait of smart developers, is a disaster for performance engineering.

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