How much overhead do frameworks like Hibernate bring?

Question

Developers are sometimes scathing of mult-tier Enterprise web applications... 'Enterprise' is viewed by some as synonymous with slow, bloated and resource-hungry.

Do frameworks such as Hibernate actually bring in a non-trivial impact on performance compared to writing your own DAOs or other less abstracted approaches? By non-trivial I suppose the question is "does the user notice pages load slower as a result".

Answer 1

With proper usage you are likely to improve performance rather than decrease it. In most cases you'll get comparable performance and when there're problems you'll have much more time to troubleshoot them.

PS Remember to use proper tools with Hibernate like Hibernate profiler. They can make wonders!

PPS Using Hibernate is not a replacement for knowing your SQL!