I made the hibernate-database part of a program. My boss keeps complianing that Hibernate is degrading the performance too much.

A friend here made a non-hibernate implementation of the interfaces that interact with the database, and he's getting a HUGE performance improvement.

An example: Inserting 7900 objects on a certain table:
With hibernate: 344s
Without: 4s

I would expect a maximum impact of a few seconds from hibernate. But I'm having all this difference.

How can I improve the hibernate access?

I've seen somethings, but they focus mostly on queries. Also, all my classes are lazy.

Any tips?

It hard to say with limited information.

If the primary purpose of the application is to insert rows into a table (as the statistics imply), Hibernate is going to lose everytime to direct JDBC -- Hibernate is doing alot more. You could try using evict() to remove objects from the session. Or you might look at using a stateless session.

If there is one critical part of the application where large amounts of data are inserted into a table, you could use a direct JDBC call for that (get a connection by calling session.connection()) and use regular Hibernate calls for all the other db access that your friend would need to handle manually in his app.

Curtis ...

After a quick look on Hib. in Action I saw that it's sluggish when it comes to inserting tons of things.

My friend claims that the queries are actually as fast as the ones done without hibernate, so... we will have to make a decison on keeping Hibernate or not in the close future.

read the docs about batchupdating and understand what an ORM to understand what is going on.

I read the documentation for batches but couldn't figure out where to put this configuration lines:

hibernate.jdbc.batch_size 20

hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache false

Where do they go? An example would be neat... :D

Those two lines go into hibernate.cfg.xml file. Personally I found a value of 20 is too high and takes up way too much memory, so I use 5. I'm having the same performance problem as you and as several other people. With the batch updates turned on things get better but it's still pretty bad.

Hum... it's bad news then. But thanks for the tip.

do read *all* of the docs about what hibernate performance is about.

batch operations can be done in so many ways...including using raw jdbc or even stored procedures.

Learn what the 1st level cache and 2nd level cache is doing and don't overload them if not needed.

One thing that came to my mind recently. Boss told me we're gonna be making at least 5 insertions per second in the base, so I guess using cache is not a very apropriate thing. At least from what I've read around and what I can think of it working.

On the other hand... boss also said he'd prefer that all transactions (inserts and updates) were to be commited only at the end of the access by the user (actually another program) because all modifications on a single access to our program, should be guarateed to be commited (in other words.. if something fails, in a blackout for example, everything has to be started over).

We're also dealing with multiple threads acessing the base at the same time.

EDIT: Oh... 1 user == 1 thread