Java Dynamic Management Kit 5.1 Tutorial

2.3.2 Dynamic MBean Execution Time

In the introduction to this chapter we presented two structural advantages of dynamic MBeans, namely the ability to wrap existing code to make it manageable and the ability to provide a self-description of the MBean and its features. Another advantage is that using dynamic MBeans can lead to faster overall execution time.

The performance gain depends on the nature of the MBean and how it is managed in the agent. For example, the SimpleDynamic MBean, as it is used, is probably not measurably faster than the SimpleStandard example in Chapter 1, Standard MBeans. When seeking improved performance, there are two situations that must be considered:

Because the dynamic MBean provides its own description, the agent does not need to introspect it as it would a standard MBean. Since introspection is done only once by the agent, this is a one-time performance gain during the lifetime of the MBean. In an environment where there are many MBean creations and where MBeans have a short lifetime, a slight performance increase can be measured.

However, the largest performance gain is in the management operations, when calling the getters, setters and invoker. As we shall see in Part II, the agent makes MBeans manageable through generic getters, setters, and invokers. In the case of standard MBeans, the agent must do the computations for resolving attribute and operation names according to the design patterns. Because dynamic MBeans necessarily expose the same generic methods, these are called directly by the agent. When a dynamic MBean has a simple management interface requiring simple programming logic in its generic methods, its implementation can show a better performance than the same functionality in a standard MBean.