Is it possible!

[Viator]

One last and perhaps relevant question. Does an obfuscator affect the
efficiency of the java byte-code?

Regards Viator

 

[Lee Fesperman]

One last and perhaps relevant question. Does an obfuscator affect the
efficiency of the java byte-code?

It's hard to say for obfuscators that obfuscate the control flow because I would assume
their purpose in doing that would not be to improve efficiency. In fact, I would think
that altering the control flow might make the runtime compilers' job harder (that is,
harder to optimize).

Otherwise, the tendency of obfucators to use shorter names would improve the
interpreter's efficiency but likely won't matter much to the results of the runtime
compiler.

 

[Oscar kind]

One last and perhaps relevant question. Does an obfuscator affect the
efficiency of the java byte-code?

It is safe to assume it does for runtime optimizations of flow obfuscated
code. It may or may not be true for compile-time optimizations: that
depends on the obfuscator being used.

If you use String obfuscation however (to protect SQL statements for
example), there certainly is a performance impact in reconstructing the
string. This is inherent in making the string unreadable. I don't know if
this performance hit is once or every time the string is needed. I
suspect/hope the former.