There are many types of performance anti-patterns in architecture. The multi-layering anti-pattern describes an architecture that attempts to achieve high abstraction through as many independent, logical application layers as possible. As a developer, such an architecture quickly becomes recognizable by the fact that much of the time spent mapping and converting data is lost, and that a simple pass from the interface to the database is complex.

Such architectures usually arise because the application should be kept as flexible as possible so that, for example, GUIs can be exchanged easily and quickly, and the dependencies on other systems and components can be kept low. The decoupling of the layers leads to performance losses during the mapping and exchange of the data— especially if the layers are also physically separated and the data exchange takes place via remoting technologies, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP).