Performance [LWN.net]

Performance

Posted Aug 7, 2003 10:07 UTC (Thu) by Carl (guest, #824)
In reply to: Performance by walles
Parent article: Natively compiled Eclipse

These are older benchmarks from before some of the Eclipse work (not all of which has been merged back into the main gcc tree yet), but they give an indication of how well gcj does against "the competition":

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Performance

Posted Aug 9, 2003 14:49 UTC (Sat) by walles (subscriber, #954) [Link]

The Free VM benchmarks do indeed demonstrate that gcj beats the other Free JVMs. Thus, if you run only Free JVMs, gcj will indeed be an improvement.

Regarding the second set of benchmarks:
* The first one doesn't say anything about for how long the test was run, so it is impossible to say whether the test measures startup time or runtime performance.
* The second one shows that IBM beats gcj if it gets to run longer ("large data"), showing that IBM has better runtime performance than gcj.
* The third shows that IBM is faster than gcj.
* The fourth one "demonstrates the fast startup time for gcj-built programs", but doesn't say anything about runtime performance.

Thus, according to those benchmarks, IBM seems to beat gcj most of the time on runtime performance, even though IBM do bounds checking all of the time which gcj doesn't (look at the build flags for gcj). SUN on the other hand seem to lose fairly vs gcj in some of these benchmarks.

If anything, the above benchmarks hint at that Eclipse might be faster on IBM's VM than on gcj. To have some real evidence of that however, one would need bencmarks run from inside of Eclipse using the same VM instance as Eclipse.