I've recently been doing some performance testing and tuning on an application. It makes use of Hibernate for the data access and ORM and Spring to configure and wire together everything. As I was looking at all of the configuration and came upon the fact that we were using the ClassicQueryTranslatorFactory. The job of the Query Translator is to turn HQL queries into SQL queries. The ClassicQueryTranslatorFactory is the version that was included in Hibernate 2. In Hibernate 3 they created a new Query Translator, the ASTQueryTranslatorFactory. This Query Translator makes use of Antlr which is a Java based parser generator in the vein of lex and yacc.
I switched out the the ClassicQueryTranslatorFactory and started to use the ASTQueryTranslatorFactory and saw an immediate boost in performance of about 15% for the application. I also noticed that fewer queries were being generated for the page loads for the application. Of course this application uses quite a bit of HQL, so if you do not make use of HQL extensively, then you might not see the same benefits.
I have yet to see any documentation or any other evidence to support the claim that the newer ASTQueryTranslatorFactory would offer better performance, but in my case it seems like it has. Has anyone else noticed this behavior?