Efficiency of Long objects over Integer objects? any ?

Question

I have a Long object which actually only stores "integer" values and we had coded it that way long before we realised it. Now I am told we need to change the LONG object to INTEGER object to improve Java efficiency. I disagree with that. Note that we are not doing any ARITHMETIC operations on the Long object at all. I understand that it would be efficient to use Integer object if theres a lot of arithmetic operations being done on it. But since we are not how is converting of Long objects to Integer going to improve my efficiency? and moreover since only integer values are stored in the Long object I dont see any memory allocation lose too....am i right in my posture?
Thanks

Answer 1

Thanks for quick reply ! are you saying Long and
Integer occupy same amount of memory space if the Long
object contains integer value ?No.
You said:
moreover since only integer values are stored in the Long
object I dont see any memory allocation lose too....am i right in my posture?I took that to mean that you thought that since the Longs contain a smaller (int-sized) values, that they're taking up the same space as Integers, and therefore you won't save any memory by switching to Integers.
That's not in fact the case. A Long takes up the same amount of space regardless of whether it's holding 0 or 1 or Integer.MAX_VALUE or Long.MAX_VALUE, and that space is probably slightly bigger (2 bytes bigger, I'd guess) than what Integer uses.
So technically, you will save some space (probably) by going to Integer. However, unless you have a huge number of these objects, that space savings will be minimal, and unless you've actually seen numbers in a profiler, it's pointless to speculate.