In my project there are some 'Prototype' factories that create instances by cloning a final private instance.

The author of those factories says that this pattern provides better performance than calling 'new' operator.

Using google to get some clues about that, I've found nothing really relevant about that. Here is a small excerpt found in a javdoc from an unknown project javdoc from an unknown project

Sadly, clone() is rather slower than calling new. However it is a lot faster than calling java.lang.Class.newInstance(), and somewhat faster than rolling our own "cloner" method.

For me it's looking like an old best practice of the java 1.1 time. Does someone know more about this ? Is this a good practice to use that with 'modern' jvm ?