JNI Performance

Question

Our main program is in java but the code that extracts our data from storage is written in C. I need to build an HDF5 file from extracted data. Would it be better to use JNI to call the C code to get the data and then build the HDF5 file from Java or to build the HDF5 from the C code?

I have little experience with JNI or C.

Also One of our main criteria is performance. How much of a performance hit is there when using JNI?

Answer 1

The function call boundary is "slow", so if you're doing many calls to your native routine, then performance will suffer.

An example of the kind of thing that may benefit from moving to JNI (I emphasize may, because Java is more than fast enough for many purposes) would be a routine to do some sort of image processing on a large bitmap. But to call a JNI routine for each pixel would be much, much slower than doing it within a loop in pure Java.

Extracting data from one format to another is, frankly, the kind of thing best done in a "scripting" language like Python, and will never be bound by CPU. Rather, the disk speed is going to be way, way slower than any language interpreter.

Answer 2

Looks to me that since you have little experience with C, your best choice is to do it from withing Java.. JNI is really not that bad.