Performance impact of using aop

Question

We have started to use spring aop for cross cutting aspects of our application (security & caching at the moment).

My manager worries about the performance impa

Answer 1

11 years after the question, look how degenerated this situation is.

Example: the vast majority think it is ok and normal to put a simple @Transactional spring java annotation to some method and let spring do the bridge between caller and callee proxied components. Now they have 20+ stackframes of undebuggable 'magic' code. The JIT compiler is rapidly exceeded and can no longer attempt inlining, or ends up bloating memory with tons of generated classes.

There is no limit to lazyness in this era of 'framework users'. No wonder e2e times for trivial http calls went from 100ms to 10 seconds. No wonder you need 2GB to run a lousy servlet container that used to run in 128MB. And don't get me started on the cost of logging exception stacktraces...

Answer 2

If performance is going to be a concern, we have used AspectJ to great effect.

Because it uses bytecode weaving (compile time vs. runtime makes quite the difference) it's one of the fastest AOP frameworks out there. See: AOP Benchmarks

Answer 3

As long as you have control of your AOP I think it's efficient. We did have performance problems anyway, so by own reasoning we were not fully in control ;) This was mostly because it's important that anyone that writes aspects has full understanding of all the other aspects in the system and how they interrelate. If you start doing "smart" things you can outsmart yourself in a jiffy. Doing smart things in a large project with lots of people who only see small parts of the system can be very dangerous performance-wise. This advice probably applies without AOP too, but AOP lets you shoot yourself in the foot in some real elegant ways.

Spring also uses proxying for scope-manipluations and thats an area where it's easy to get undesired performance losses.

But given that you have control, the only real pain point with AOP is the effect on debugging.

Answer 4

i have used spring AOP in a batch process in my current project to transaction manage a database.

At first, it was figured that there wouldn't be a performance problem, but we didn't figure into the equation that we called the database thousands of times. one aspect call in aop doesn't affect performance much, but multiply that by thousands, and it turns out the new system was worse than the old one, due to these extra method calls.

I'd say that aop is a great system to use, but try to take note on how many methods calls are added to your application

Answer 5

If you are using some one framework for aspects there can be some performance issues .Next if you are creating abstraction above some one framework and aspects handling is done from framework then its very difficult to find out the cause of the problem relating to performance issues . If you are really concern about performance and small time slice concern more ,i suggest to write own aspects .No one want to reinvent the wheel but sometime for better it can be best.You can write own implementation of AOP alliance abstraction .

Answer 6

Have you ever thought about an AOP tools that adding aspects to object at runtime when you need? There is one for .net "Add Aspects to Object Using Dynamic Decorator" (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/aspectddecorator.aspx). I believe you can write a similiar one for Java.