Performance problems when using lots of AOP request scoped beans

Question

I\'m working on a semi-large application using Spring 3 and am running into performance problems when throwing hundreds of users at it at once. I\'m using several request scope

Answer 1

As it turns out, Spring actually does cache the request scoped beans, in the request attributes. If you're curious, take a look at AbstractRequestAttributesScope, which RequestScope extends:

public Object get(String name, ObjectFactory objectFactory) {
    RequestAttributes attributes = RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes();
    Object scopedObject = attributes.getAttribute(name, getScope());
    if (scopedObject == null) {
        scopedObject = objectFactory.getObject();
        attributes.setAttribute(name, scopedObject, getScope());
    }
    return scopedObject;
}

So while AbstractBeanFactory.getBean() does get called on every bean method call because of the aop proxy, it only causes Spring to add to that synchronized set if the bean wasn't already found in the request attributes.

Avoiding the proxying of every method call on my request scoped beans would still reduce complexity but with this caching in place, the performance impact would be minimal. I think the slow performance is something I'm going to have to live with if I want a ton of request scoped beans and still serve a ton of requests at a time.