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Asked: 2026-06-09T11:31:08+00:00

Whenever I write a new class, I use quite a ton of class variables

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Whenever I write a new class, I use quite a ton of class variables to describe the class’s properties, up to the point where when I go back to review the codes I’ve typed, I see 40s to 50s of class variables, regardless of whether they are public, protected, or private, they are all used prominently throughout the classes I’ve defined.

Even though, the class variables consists of mostly primitive variables, like booleans, integers, doubles, etc., I still have this uneasy feeling where that some of my classes with large amounts of class variables may have an impact on performances, however negligible they may be.

But being rational as possible, if I consider unlimited RAM size and unlimited Java class variables, a Java class may be an infinitely large block of memory in the RAM, which the first portion of the block contains the class variables partitions, and the rest of the block contains the addresses to the class methods within the Java class. With this amount of RAM, the performance for it is very nontrivial.

But that above isn’t making my feelings any easier than said. If we were to consider limited RAM but unlimited Java class variables, what would be the result? What would really happen in an environment where performance matters?

And probably may get mentioned beforehand, I don’t know if having lots of class variables counts as bad Java practice, when all of them are important, and all classes have been refactored.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Performance has nothing to do with the number of fields an object has. Memory consumption is of course potentially affected, but if the variables are needed, you can’t do much about it.
    Don’t worry too much about performance. Make your code simple, readable, maintainable, tested. Then, if you notice performance problems, measure and profile to see where they come from, and optimize where needed.

    Maintainability and readability is affected by the number of fields an object has though. 40 to 50 fields is quite a lot of fields, and is probably an indication that your classes do too much on their own, and have too many responsibilities. Refactoring them to many, smaller subclasses, and using composition would probably be a good idea.

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