How to Use JPA Correctly to Avoid Complaints of a Slow Application

JPA is a useful tool for Java development, allowing developers to abstract interactions with the underlying database. But that abstraction can come at a performance cost. In this blog, we look at the pros and cons of JPA, how to improve JPA performance, and provide performance improvement stats to help you choose the best method first. Lastly, we give advice on how to avoid those issues in the first place.

The Problem With JPA

Over the last few years, I’ve come across with several enterprise applications that use JPA to manage their data, which is cool since JPA is a very powerful and awesome specification. Unfortunately, I came to realize that this technology is commonly used improperly, which generates a lot of complaints and even full-scale wars between database administrators (DBAs) and developers.

A Familiar Story

The day is clear and sunny, birds chirping happily as Lea, a project manager, makes her way to a meeting with Robert, a development team lead. “Dude, our application is slow,” she tells Robert.

Robert smirks. “Our code is impeccable, so this is probably a database problem. Let me ask our database admin, Dan,” and he picks up the phone.

“Hey Dan,” Robert says, “Lea says the application is slow. Can’t you create some indexes, or do something to speed it up?”

“Well Robert, it seems the database is flooded with queries! What the hell is this application doing??” cries Dan.

“Just deal with it!” exclaims Robert, hanging up.

“%$@#!!” mutters Dan.

If you have some basic knowledge of JPA (which you should to get the most out of this article), then I can bet that many of you have heard a similar exchange before.

The Pros and Cons of JPA

A great thing about JPA is that abstracts your interaction with the underlying database. A bad thing about JPA is that abstracts your interaction with the underlying database.

You can write database access code very easily and get most of the general database operations out of the box without having to write all that tedious JDBC code. On the other hand, you also need to have some knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes or you’ll be in for some unpleasant surprises.

Believe it or not, I met a few developers that had no idea that JPA uses a database underneath. I feel that the majority of the developers are only concerned about getting the data they need, and don’t worry about anything else.

And this is why I decided to write this article: I’ve seen the same mistakes repeated over and over again, and they actually have a huge performance impact.

4 Ways to Improve JPA Performance

I’ve written down four areas in which I usually find all the issues: these are the ones I check first when I have to hunt down JPA performance problems.

• Eager fetching
• Lazy fetching
• Pagination
• Smart Column select

Shamefully, I always find them out during my analysis after the fact, even though they seem completely obvious! In any case, I believe that these mistakes are not deliberately put into the application--most of the time, it’s poor knowledge about the technology itself. I hope this article could raise some awareness and guide developers to write better and faster JPA code.

There's also another great post by Thorben Janssen where he talks about JPA features that can help with the application performance: boosting your application performance with JPA.

1. Eager Fetching

Eager Fetching is a strategy that allows you to get additional data when you are loading an entity to have everything available for your needs...(but at what cost?)

Let’s imagine that you have a Department entity with an @OneToMany relationship to Employee defined with Eager Fetching. If you have a page where you are only displaying the Departments, you are also selecting the Employees for each Department. This scenario suffers from an increase of the loading time of data that you don’t need to fulfill your requirement.

So ask yourself: Do you really need all the data that you eagerly fetched? Most likely you don’t, not for every situation. So unless you know what you are doing, don’t use it.

2. Lazy Fetching

The Lazy Fetching strategy is a hint to the persistence provider runtime that data should be fetched lazily when it is first accessed. It seems like a good thing and usually it is, but sometimes it can slow down your application. Have you ever heard about the N+1 select problem? This happens when you select an entity and then iterate the results to access a collection in a lazy fashion.

     List departments = entityManager.createQuery("select d from 
Department d").getResultList();
        for (Department department : departments) {
            // Issues a “select * from Employee where departmentId = ?”
            List employees = department.getEmployees();
        }

This is incredibly inefficient, since you have to go to the database and bring the results one row at a time. If you already know that you’re going to need the Employee data, you could write the query like this:

     List departments = entityManager.createQuery("select d from 
Department d left join fetch d.employees").getResultList();

In this case, only a single database query is performed with all the data already populated in the return results.

Keep in mind, that Lazy Fetching is just giving a hint to the provider. The implementation is permitted to eagerly fetch data for which the Lazy strategy hint has been specified, but the most popular ones have the same behavior regarding collections and the example I just gave.

3. Pagination

Paginating your results is probably one of the best ways to increase the performance of your JPA application. If you have a table with 1 million records you are not going to display them all, right? RIGHT? Performing pagination on the client side is not the answer either, because the database had to return all the records anyway. Pagination should be done directly into the database, and you only have to call...

        setFirstResult();
        setMaxResults();

...in the Query object to paginate results.

4. Smart Column Select

Pagination deals with the amount of records (lines) in your table, but what about the number of columns? What if you have 100 columns, including BLOB’S, TEXT’s or other big sized data types? Even if you don’t, you should only select the required columns for the operation you are trying to perform. This will reduce the amount of data sent by the database to your application and speedup the query that you are executing.

Instead of writing: entityManager.createQuery("select d from Department d")

You can write, if you only need the Department id: entityManager.createQuery("select d.id from Department d")

JPA Performance Improvement Stats

Ok, so you probably thinking that this is all hogwash, and until you see some real numbers, there is no way this could be true.

I compiled a few test cases with some of the scenarios presented above and you can check the results in the table below. These are very simple tests: I added 2000 Departments with 100 columns each, and Departments have a one-to-many relationship with Employees, where each Department record has two Employees and Employees each have 100 columns.

The tests were run one at a time on three separate occasions, using Wildfly, Hibernate and H2 as the provider and with a database in a local environment. If you’d like to try it out yesterday, get the code on my GitHub page:  https://github.com/radcortez/jpa-performance

2 Tips to Avoid JPA Performance Issues

1. Know your JPA Provider - Hibernate, EclipseLink or OpenJPA are probably the most well known JPA Providers. While providers have to comply with the standards, the specification is open in a few scenarios, which may cause different behaviors for each implementation.  Think about the Lazy hint strategy that I explained a couple of lines ago as an example.

The Provider has a considerable amount of impact on your JPA application performance, so you should try to understand these little bits to get the most out of your chosen implementation. Some providers extended the specification and have a few features that you can use to improve performance if you don’t mind to sacrifice portability. Stay tuned; I’m planning to write another blog post exploring these on my own blog.

2. Consider finding a DBA to join your team - Databases are complex pieces of software. There are a lot of ways you can optimize and increase the performance of your queries and this also depends on the database engine that you’re using. In my opinion, having a specialist with you that can help you write optimized queries and monitor the application load is most of the times underrated.

In one of my previous jobs, I used to hear this a lot: “Database guys are not needed!” and I couldn’t disagree more. The most successful projects I have ever worked I always had a DBA backing me up. Probably without their help, I would be stuck working in some random car wash.

Final Thoughts

I think the numbers speak by themselves. The n + 1 select had the worst performance as expected. Both tests for relationships set to Eager or fetched on the query have similar results, since the query performed is the same, but remember it may be getting data that you don’t really need. Now, performing the query without the relationships have a very good boost, but you get better results if you just select the columns you need and squeeze the last extra bit by paginating the results.

Keep in mind that these times are only to demonstrate an order of magnitude between the different scenarios. Applying these techniques may not give you a flat linear performance increase, since you have to account in other factors like: database engine, network latency, system load etc., but for sure it’s going to help you to develop faster applications

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Additional Resources

If you want to further improve your JPA performance, be sure to check out our article on JPA best practices.

Or, if you're looking for further tips on improving application performance, be sure to check out the webinar and articles below.

• Developer's Guide to Microservices Performance
• Eight Ways to Improve Java Microservices Performance