I am currently developing an application using Spring MVC4 and hibernate 4. I have implemented hibernate second level cache for performance improvement. If I use Redis which is an in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache etc, the performance will increase but will it be a drastic change?
Drastic differences you may expect if you cache what is good to be cached and avoid caching data that should not be cached at all. Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder the same is with the performance. Here are several aspects you should have in mind when using hibernate AS second level cache provider:
No Custom serialization - Memory intensive
If you use second level caching, you would not be able to use fast serialization frameworks such as Kryo and will have to stick to java serializable which sucks.
On top of this for each entity type you will have a separate region and within each region, you will have an entry for each key of each entity. In terms of memory efficiency, this is inefficient.
Lacks the ability to store and distribute rich objects
Most of the modern caches also present computing grid functionality having your objects fragmented into many small pieces decrease your ability to execute distributed tasks with guaranteed data co-location. That depends a little bit on the Grid provider, but for many would be a limitation.
Sub optimal performance
Depending on how much performance you need and what type of application you are having using hibernate second level cache might be a good or a bad choice. Good in terms that it is plug and play...." kind of..." bad because you will never squeeze the performance you would have gained. Also designing rich models mean more upfront work and more OOP.
Limited querying capabilities ON the Cache itself
That depends on the cache provider, but some of the providers really are not good doing JOINs with Where clause different than the ID. If you try to build and in memory index for a query on Hazelcast, for example, you will see what I mean.