Brain Murmurs

We’ve spent the last couple of days profiling the performance of the OS X screen saver.

The current best performing client we have is the Windows Screen Saver, followed closely by the various UNIX daemon clients. This is because these clients all use the Java Server VM.

OS X didn’t even have a real Server VM until they released the 1.5 JDK. Previously releases simply changed the initial heap sizes and garbage collection options if the Server VM was requested.

Now they’ve got a 1.5 Server VM available, and we really want to use it. The performance jump for the OS X client is extreme: from ~220 MFLOPS with the Client VM up to almost ~500 MFLOPS with the Server VM. This makes the (Intel Core Duo) performance of the OS X client a hot contender for the “fastest JIVA Client” crown.

We immediately switched the JIVA Daemon Client over the Server VM upon realizing this. What we are currently working on is a way to use the Server JVM from the Java Invocation API, since the Screen Savers run an embedded JVM instead of using the regular commandline application.

Well, we will have this resolved in short order. The performance gains are too huge to let this go.

Filed under: JIVA (Technical) by Administrator