betweenGo

Beginning in JDK 1.4.2, allocation of new objects is no longer expensive according to this article, Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited. According to this article.

… allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations…

The malloc/free approach deals with blocks of memory one at a time, whereas the garbage collection approach tends to deal with memory management in large batches, yielding more opportunities for optimization (at the cost of some loss in predictability).

This “plausibility argument” — that it is easier to clean up a mess in one big batch than to pick up individual pieces of dust throughout the day — is borne out by the data.

So allocate away, never object pool, don’t do strange, non-intuitive things to avoid allocating objects on the heap. Life is good.

Related posts:

1. Enums in Java
2. Effective Java Collections
3. Playing with Dates in Java
4. Covariant Return Types in Java
5. Java Method with Generic Return Type