Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

Improving Reflection Performance

One of the big knocks against Reflection is that it's quite a bit slower than normal field and method access. When you use Reflection as part of your application, there are a few things you can do to speed things up.

First, if you do a lot of method lookups, consider creating a cache of the methods, possibly by some unique name so you don't have to create a description of the method parameters every time. Any time you can avoid creating a new object you'll save time.

Second, consider creating static arrays for some commonly used, read-only object arrays. For instance, when you invoke a get method on an object, you typically pass a zero-length array. You should create a static zero-length object array and use it ...