Introduction
Recently, I tried out the PMD Java source code analyzer, which pointed to some performance issues regarding String and StringBuffer usage. I am always sceptical about performance claims, but this message raised particular concern:
Avoid appending characters as strings in StringBuffer.append.
This means that you should not use a String of one character when appending something to a StringBuffer:
strBuffer.append("a"); // wrong
strBuffer.append('a'); // right
Of course, the two lines do exactly the same: appending a character to a StringBuffer. However, because the parameters are of different types different functions are called which can result in different performance.
In the next pages, we look into the performance of String concatenating methods.