can anyone think of an instance where it wouldn't be advantageous to declared a private method final? b/c as i've read final methods optimized could by being mainline. The only disadvantage of using final is that the method can't be over-riden by a subclass... but private methods aren't inherited anyway! it seems to make perfect sense to me to declare all all my private methods as final .... unless the Java compiler already does that and it would be redundant. Any thoughts anyone?