While working on performance improvement of EJB3 deployments (EJBTHREE-1800), i have been seeing that most of the time is spent in AOP (ex: finding annotations, creating interceptor chains etc...).

The sample app that i am trying is 100 EJBs with 100 methods each. (The performance degrades drastically as the number of methods increases)

One of the issues relates to the way a joinpoint for a method is created
Here's the flow:

- (AOP) Interceptor chain for EJB containers is created
- While the chain is being created, the corresponding AspectFactory are created

protected Object createBean(ClassLoader cl) throws Throwable
 {
 ClassLoader loader = cl;
 if (loader == null)
 loader = Configurator.getClassLoader(classLoader);
 BeanInfo info = null;
 if (bean != null)
 info = configurator.getBeanInfo(bean, loader, accessMode);

 Joinpoint joinpoint = configurator.getConstructorJoinPoint(info, constructor, null);

....//blah blah blah

 invokeLifecycle("create", create, info, loader, result);
 invokeLifecycle("start", start, info, loader, result);

 return result;
 }

The invokeLifecycle tries to call the create() and start() methods if any:

protected void invokeLifecycle(String methodName, LifecycleMetaData lifecycle, BeanInfo info, ClassLoader cl, Object target) throws Throwable
 {
 if (lifecycle == null || lifecycle.isIgnored() == false)
 {
 String method = methodName;
 if (lifecycle != null && lifecycle.getMethodName() != null)
 method = lifecycle.getMethodName();
 List<ParameterMetaData> parameters = null;
 if (lifecycle != null)
 parameters = lifecycle.getParameters();
 MethodJoinpoint joinpoint;
 try
 {
 joinpoint = configurator.getMethodJoinPoint(info, cl, method, parameters, false, true);
 }
...// blah blah

The calls goes to AbstractKernelConfigurator.getMethodJoinPoint:

 public MethodJoinpoint getMethodJoinPoint(BeanInfo info, ClassLoader cl, String name, List<ParameterMetaData> parameters, boolean isStatic, boolean isPublic) throws Throwable
 {
 return Configurator.findMethod(info, cl, name, parameters, isStatic, isPublic);
 }

The findMethod ultimately leads to this implementation in org.jboss.joinpoint.plugins.Config

public static MethodInfo findMethodInfo(ClassInfo classInfo, String name, String[] paramTypes, boolean isStatic, boolean isPublic, boolean strict) throws JoinpointException
 {

...// blah blah

 MethodInfo result = locateMethodInfo(current, name, paramTypes, isStatic, isPublic, strict);
 if (result != null)
 return result;
 current = current.getSuperclass();
 }

The implementation for locateMethodInfo looks unnecessarily expensive:

private static MethodInfo locateMethodInfo(ClassInfo classInfo, String name, String[] paramTypes, boolean isStatic, boolean isPublic, boolean strict)
 {
 MethodInfo[] methods = classInfo.getDeclaredMethods();
 if (methods != null)
 {
 for (int i = 0; i < methods.length; ++i)
 {
 if (name.equals(methods[ i].getName()) &&
 equals(paramTypes, methods[ i].getParameterTypes()) &&
 (strict == false || (methods[ i].isStatic() == isStatic && methods[ i].isPublic() == isPublic)))
 return methods[ i];
 }
 }
 return null;
 }

This locateMethodInfo is passed with the method name and params, so any specific reason why it needs to get all the declared methods and then do a equals on them instead of using the other API on ClassInfo which accepts the method name and params:

MethodInfo getDeclaredMethod(String name, TypeInfo[] parameters);

The current implementation leads to a performance degradation when the number of methods increases (All this piece of code is trying to do is find a couple of methods named create() and start()).