Memory Usage in Java

[Florian Weimer]

* John Dallman:

> On any remotely modern processor architecture, ten byte-sized
> variables will only occupy ten bytes of space. The way they get
> fetched into the processor is somewhat complicated but ensures that
> several of them will normally be fetched in one read.

That's not true for local variables, though.  I don't know if Hotspot
has a clear preference, but other compilers tend not to use byte-level
access for local variables.  The reasons vary.  Register pair or
multi-register stores and loads are usually not available at the byte
level, and the instruction encoding for byte accesses might be less
compact.

Thanks,
Florian