Need of a faster array copy

Question

After doing a bit of reading, I discovered that there are some differences in the ways you can copy arrays in java. For my application I have a recursive tree of nodes, each containing a 2d board array (8x8).

Through profiler testing, the best thing I could come up with is the java.util.Arrays.copyOf(array) method, which uses the native System.arraycopy.

Even with this, I am spending 80% of my time creating new arrays. If anyone has any ideas on how to speed this up I'd appreciate it. Perhaps going to a 64 item array rather than an 8x8 would be faster. I'll test this shortly.

Answer 1

The fact that you are spending 80% time copying arrays means one of two things:

1. array copying is too slow;
2. you are barely doing anything else beside copying arrays.

Your copying performance may already be cutting-edge; consider the architecture of your application instead, try reducing the amount of copied data.