Java Performance On Ubuntu Vs. Windows Vista

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."

Comments

Re:that's odd

[Shados]

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:3D in Java?

[Nicopa]

I think you should check the Java port of Quake then: http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

Re:always trust phronix to mess a benchmark up

[hansamurai]

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

Re:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details..

[chrb]

even then the performance difference is too large to be attributed to which bit of the disk you're reading

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:Interesting, but lacking some crucial details..

[ozphx]

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.