Spring pointcut designators differences (within vs execution)

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Please... can anybody explain me what are the differences between using the following spring pointcut designators?

Using "within pointcut designator":

<aop:pointcut expression="within(my.app.dao.impl.*)" id="commonDaoOperation"/>

Using "execution pointcut designator":

<aop:pointcut expression="execution(public * my.app.dao.impl.*.*(..))" id="commonDaoOperation"/>

I am using the second one in my web-projects (and I think it's the most used), the problem i have found with this approach is that it's consuming a lot of memory in the heap...

After analyzing the "heap dump" of the application server with the "eclipse memory analyzer" i have found that my application is consuming 450 MB and the instances of the class "org.springframework.aop.aspectj.AspectJExpressionPointcut" are consuming 30% of those 450MB...

Each instance of AspectJExpressionPointcut occupy 6 MB (approximately) and this is because each instance mantains a cache of matches with instances of java.lang.reflect.Method and surprisingly there are a lot of java methods cached (methods that my pointcut expression doesnt mentions).

After Reading Spring Documentation, I decided to use the first one approach (within pointcut designator) and now each instance of AspectJExpressionPointcut occupy much less memory.

The question is about that... what is the difference in performance between them...

Many thanks in advance...

pointcut spring-aop spring java
2 Answers

execution() matches join points that are method executions. This is the only designator that actually performs matches. All other designators (supported by Spring AOP) only limit those matches. Note that Spring supports only a subset of designators available in AspectJ (Spring AOP is proxy-based). AspectJ pointcut designators that are supported in Spring are: args() and @args(), target() and @target(), within() and @within(), execution(), this(), @annotation

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