Flyweight Pattern
Summary
- The Flyweight pattern reduces the cost of working with large numbers of very small objects.
- The Flyweight pattern is specifically designed to be used when all the following conditions are in place:
- There is a very large number of objects (thousands) that may not fit in memory.
- Most of the state can be kept on disk or calculated at runtime.
- The remaining state can be factored into a much smaller number of objects with shared state.
Class diagram: (see Flyweight Pattern code review)
Usage
Use the Flyweight pattern when there are:
- Many objects to deal with in memory.
- Different kinds of state, which can be handled differently to achieve space savings.
- Groups of objects that share state.
- Ways of computing some of the state at runtime.