Sling models performance (part 3)

In the first and second part of this series “Sling Models performance” I covered aspects which can degrade the performance of your Sling models, be it by not specifying the correct injector or by re-using complex models for very simple cases (by complex PostConstruct models).

And there is another aspect when it comes to performance degradation, and it starts with a very cool convenience function. Because Sling Models can create a whole tree of objects. Imagine this code as part of a Sling Model:

@ChildResource
AnotherModel child;

It will adapt the child-resource named “child” into the class “AnotherModel” and inject it. This nesting is a cool feature and can be a time-saver if you have a more complex resource structure to model your content.

But also it comes with a price, because it will create another Sling Model object; and even that Sling Model can trigger the creation of more Sling Models, and so on. And as I have outlined in my previous posts, the creation of these Sling Models does not come for free. So if your “main Sling Model” internally creates a whole tree of Sling Models, the required time will increase. Which can be justified, but not if you just need a fraction of the data of the Sling Models. So is it worth to spend 10 miliseconds to create a complex Sling Model just to call a simple getter of it, if you could retrieve this information alone in just 10 microseconds?

So this is a situation, where I need to repeat what I have written already in part 2:

When you build your Sling Models, try to resolve all data lazily, when it is requested the first time.

Sling Model Perforamance (part 2)

But unfortunately, injectors do not work lazily but eagerly; injections are executed as part of construction of the model. Having a lazy injection would be a cool feature …

So until this is available, you should use check the re-use of Sling Model quite carefully; always consider how much work is actually done in the background, and if the value of reusing that Sling Model is worth the time spent in rendering.