Java Performance On Ubuntu Vs. Windows Vista 258
Henckle writes "Phoronix did a comparison of the Java performance between Ubuntu and Windows Vista. They tested both Java and OpenJDK on Ubuntu 8.10 and Java on Windows Vista Premium SP1, all with stock configurations. To no-one's surprise, Ubuntu was faster in a majority of the tests. The two OSs were similar in ray-tracing, and Vista was faster at Java OpenGL due to shortcomings with the Linux graphics driver."
Re:that's odd (Score:5, Informative)
They -are- different JVM builds, so its possible (as is common in the JVM's history) that some bug fixes improve performance wildly... Not across the board though, so something's wrong, either with the JVM, or with Windows itself... but something is seriously messed up.
Re:That's my laptop! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:3D in Java? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you should check the Java port of Quake then: http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html [bytonic.de]
Re:always trust phronix to mess a benchmark up (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent point, u10 was the next "major" minor release after u07, check out the release notes for it here, they're... long.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/6u10.html [sun.com]
Re:always trust phronix to mess a benchmark up (Score:3, Informative)
they used java 1.6.0_10 on linux and 1.6.0_07 on windows. Hate to give the benefit of the doubt to ballmer & co but in spite of the minor version number, a lot of work in performance has been done on Java recently. The result is pretty meaningless.
Indeed, this is a fairly lame benchmark. Java 6 update 10 is when they switched to the "consumer JRE" (also known as update "N"), which included a lot of changes to lower the footprint of the JRE, improve startup time, etc.
Re:That's my laptop! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details.. (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't. How do you know that a particular sector of the hard disk isn't failing, causing access to that one sector to be a thousand times slower than other sectors? This is why experiments are supposed to be run many times, across different platforms, and the aggregate results taken. Without multiple experimental replicates you have no way of showing that the results you observe generalise at all; the observed problem could just be one bad run.
Re:that's odd (Score:3, Informative)
Protected Mode leverage's Windows Vista's UAC
You're right that its not running in a VM like VMware, but we're talking about the same thing. IE7's protected mode is just a UAC Virtualization applied to IE7. For more info on virtualized processes: http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Protecting-System-Files-UAC-Virtualization-Part1.html [windowsecurity.com] but it sounds like you are already familiar with it.
BTW, the link is for anybody else reading, it's apparent you are familiar w/ how UAC works. Cheers.
Stock configurations (Score:3, Informative)
One also has to wonder how well they "tuned" the Vista install.
Everything left to default, including desktop effects according to TFA.
Re:Bah, theoretical Java performance (Score:2, Informative)
Nonsense. Windows overhead doesn't "include" IE; the shell uses the IE rendering engine. If you run Firefox in Linux, you've got one copy of the Firefox rendering engine loaded and you're using that copy of it in Firefox. If you run IE, you've got one copy of rendering engine loaded and both the shell (explorer.exe) and Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) use it.
The only potential advantage here is that the rendering engine might already be in physical memory when you start IE.
I suppose you could possibly "waste" some memory in the Linux scenario if the UI had loaded a HTML rendering engine other than the one your browser used. But it would just get paged out if you ran out of memory...
Re:A couple of test vs. scientific benchmark (Score:3, Informative)
When was the last time you tried running Windows 64 bit? My experience is that both Vista 64 and Win7 64 both have great driver support now (never tried XP64, but the XPDM (XP driver model) is deprecated, so I understand why finding hardware for the platform is hard). In fact, the issues at Vista launch were largely due to moving to the new driver model, and hardware vendors not being up to speed. Two years later, those issues are no longer a problem.
Or was your comment sufficiently advanced satire that I'm missing? :)
Re:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details.. (Score:3, Informative)
That's gotta be the stupidest comment I've ever read. Congratulations.
Programming languages are not IO bound. Operating systems aren't IO bound. TASKS are IO bound. ALGORITHMS are IO bound.
Re:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details.. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah its pretty much assclowing IMO. I just booted my Vista laptop this morning. Process explorer shows 9300B idle cycles vs around 200B for other shit (mostly Opera, Steam, and sony's shitty phone sync). Taking them out we're left with bugger all - around 10B cycles "wasted" by default Vista services etc (well, actually SetPoint, AVG, Daemon tools, but regardless). Most of these aren't actually doing anything, just sitting there having started and are now idle. Looks like close as makes no odds 100% CPU avaliable for their JVM.
So according to this, the OS has fuck all overhead in terms of services. So either the kernel is managing the 50% overhead we saw in the SciMark test - or their tests / JVM are crap.
I'd tend towards thinking the latter.
Re:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details.. (Score:3, Informative)
See my previous comment [slashdot.org]. My Vista install still has everything turned on - and realistically it makes zero difference.
I'd suggest either the JVM sucks, or their tests sucked.