Complicating complexity: Algorithm performance in the new machine age

It’s no simple matter to explain the performance of even a simple Java program when instruction execution time is often overshadowed by other costs. Even when network and IO have been taken into account, two programs with similar computational complexity—their big-O characteristics—can differ in cache usage, with big resulting differences in performance.

For the Java programmer, this means that big-O analysis no longer gives enough guidance in choosing a collection implementation for performance-critical code. In this talk, Maurice Naftalin explores optimization of the memory layout and performance of some simple programs via alternative collection implementations and frameworks, and the open-source ObjectLayout library.

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