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Showing posts from December, 2014

On heap vs off heap memory usage

Overview I was recently asked about the benefits and wisdom of using off heap memory in Java.  The answers may be of interest to others facing the same choices. Off heap memory is nothing special.  The thread stacks, application code, NIO buffers are all off heap.  In fact in C and C++, you only have unmanaged memory as it does not have a managed heap by default.  The use of managed memory or "heap" in Java is a special feature of the language. Note: Java is not the only language to do this. new Object() vs Object pool vs Off Heap memory. new Object() Before Java 5.0, using object pools was very popular.  Creating objects was still very expensive.   However, from Java 5.0, object allocation and garbage cleanup was made much cheaper, and developers found they got a performance speed up and a simplification of their code by removing object pools and just creating new objects whenever needed.  Before Java 5.0, almost any object pool, even an obje...