I read that JVM stores internally short, integer and long as 4 bytes. I read it from an article from the year 2000, so I don\'t know how true it is now.
For the newe
long 64 –9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9 ,223,372,036,854,775,807
int 32 –2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
short 16 –32,768 to 32,767
byte 8 –128 to 127
Use what you need, I would think shorts are rarely used due to the small range and it is in big-endian format.
Any performance gain would be minimal, but like I said if your application requires a range more then that of a short go with int. The long type may be too extremly large for you; but again it all depends on your application.
You should only use short if you have a concern over space (memory) otherwise use int (in most cases). If you are creating arrays and such try it out by declaring arrays of type int and short. Short will use 1/2 of the space as opposed to the int. But if you run the tests based on speed / performance you will see little to no difference (if you are dealing with Arrays), in addition, the only thing you save is space.
Also being that a commentor mentioned long because a long is 64 bits. You will not be able to store the size of a long in 4 bytes (notice the range of long).