I am very familiar with the concept of object pooling and I always try to use it as much as possible.
Additionally I always thought that object pooling is the standard norm as I have observed that Java itself as well as the other frameworks use pooling as much as possible.
Recently though I read something that was completely new (and counter-intuitive?) to me.
That pooling actually makes program performance worse especially in concurrent applications, and it is advisable to instantiate new objects instead, since in newer JVMs, instantiation of an object is really fast.
I read this in the book: Java Concurrency in Practice
Now I am starting to think if I am missunderstanding something here since the first part of the book adviced to use Executors that reuse Threads instead of creating new instances.
So has object pooling become deprecated nowadays?
Best Answer
It is deprecated as a general technique, because - as you noticed - creation and destruction of short lived objects per se (i.e. memory allocation and GC) is extremely cheap in modern JVMs. So using a hand-written object pool for your run-of-the-mill objects is most likely slower, more complicated and more error-prone than plain
new.*It still has its uses though, for special objects whose creation is relatively costly, like DB / network connections, threads etc.
*Once I had to improve the performance of a crawling Java app. Investigation uncovered an attempt to use an object pool to allocate millions of objects... and the clever guy who wrote it used a single global lock to make it thread safe. Replacing the pool with plain
newmade the app 30 times faster.