Obfuscation and Performance

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Hi,

Does Obfuscation affect the performance? Any performance tips though obfuscation is required by the application?

Thanks.

[s ravi chandran]

Mourouganandame Arunachalam wrote:Hi,

Does Obfuscation affect the performance? Any performance tips though obfuscation is required by the application?

Thanks.

As far as I remember, obfuscation doesnt add anything extra to your code. it will just replace all meaning class informatino with some random naming pattern. That is just to make it hard to decipher. Nothing to do with actual running of the application.

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Not always so simple.... flow obfuscation does add code....

[Bengt Rutisson]

Yes, I've seen cases where obfuscation affects performance. Remember that the JIT compiler is mostly optimised to recognize common Java patterns and try to handle them in smart ways. If the obfuscation changes a "normal" pattern in the code to something that is not very common it may well cause the JIT to miss out on some optimisations.

As always with performance it is hard to give general advice. The best method is to measure the effects. For obfuscation this should be pretty straight forward. Measure the performance of your application with and without obfuscation and see if you can notice any performance difference.