Specifically looking for Java code tips and tricks of the trade for:
- reducing memory footprint
- increasing performance
Personally would like to see answers focusing on the "how" and not the "when" as the consensus among savvy developers is that early optimization is a bad idea as you don't have anything to profile and thus don't know what the actual bottlenecks will be.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"
"In established engineering disciplines a 12 % improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering"
Donald Knuth