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Asked: 2026-05-25T19:35:08+00:00

I’m gathering some data about the difference in performance between a JVM method call

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I’m gathering some data about the difference in performance between a JVM method call and a remote method call using a binary protocol (in other words, not SOAP). I am developing a framework in which a method call may be local or remote at the discretion of the framework, and I’m wondering at what point it’s “worth it” to evaluate the method remotely, either on a much faster server or on a compute grid of some kind. I know that a remote call is going to be much, much slower, so I’m mostly interested in understanding the order-of-magnitude differnce. Is it 10 times slower, or 100, or 1,000? Does anyone have any data on this? I’ll write my own benchmarks if necessary, but I’m hoping to re-use some existing knowledge. Thanks!

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  1. Editorial Team

    Having developed a low latency RMI (~20 micro-seconds min) it is still 1000x slower than a direct call. If you use plain Java RMI, (~500 micro-seconds min) it can be 25,000x slower.

    NOTE: This is only a very rough estimate to give you a general idea of the difference you might see. There are many complex factors which could change these numbers dramatically. Depending on what the method does, the difference could be much lower, esp if you perform RMI to the same process, if the network is relatively slow the difference could be much larger.

    Additionally, even when there is a very large relative difference, it may be that it won’t make much difference across your whole application.

    To elaborate on my last comment…

    Lets say you have a GUI which has to poll some data every second and it uses a background thread to do this. Lets say that using RMI takes 50 ms and the alternative is making a direct method call to a local copy of a distributed cache takes 0.0005 ms. That would appear to be an enormous difference, 100,000x. However, the RMI call could start 50 ms earlier, still poll every second, the difference to the user is next to nothing.

    What could be much more important is when RMI compared with using another approach is much simpler (if its the right tool for the job)

    An alternative to use RMI is using JMS. Which is best depends on your situation.

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