Worrying about my web application's performances, I am wondering which of "if/else" or switch statement is better regarding performance?
That's micro optimization and premature optimization, which are evil. Rather worry about readabililty and maintainability of the code in question. If there are more than two if/else blocks glued together or its size is unpredictable, then you may highly consider a switch statement.
Alternatively, you can also grab Polymorphism. First create some interface:
public interface Action {
void execute(String input);
}
And get hold of all implementations in some Map. You can do this either statically or dynamically:
Map<String, Action> actions = new HashMap<String, Action>();
Finally replace the if/else or switch by something like this (leaving trivial checks like nullpointers aside):
actions.get(name).execute(input);
It might be microslower than if/else or switch, but the code is at least far better maintainable.
As you're talking about webapplications, you can make use of HttpServletRequest#getPathInfo() as action key (eventually write some more code to split the last part of pathinfo away in a loop until an action is found). You can find here similar answers:
If you're worrying about Java EE webapplication performance in general, then you may find this article useful as well. There are other areas which gives a much more performance gain than only (micro)optimizing the raw Java code.