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

Ray tracing in Java

[olddotter]

Have computers or JIT compilers gotten fast enough that people actually do ray tracing in Java?

Re:Ray tracing in Java

[Yetihehe]

Yes. Sunflow is one example. I did my own tests, java vs c++ (almoste the same code) and java was only about 1.3 times slower.

Re:Ray tracing in Java

[shutdown -p now]

Compared to plain C/C++ code (no non-standard compiler intrinsics etc), Java has been fast enough for a long time now. Think about it: it's all just math, and JIT (which may itself be slow - it doesn't matter!) generates pretty much the same native code as a C compiler would. g++ can still do some trickier optimizations, which may account for the odd 5-10% of difference; but hardly more than that. .NET can actually fare even better, because it supports raw unsafe code and data pointers with arithmetic, dynamic allocation of stack memory (alloca), and unions - this essentially covers all optimization tricks available in ANSI C.

Not surprising

[greg_barton]

I've been using scimark for years to evaluate system performance with java.

Try it yourself.

Linux has outperformed windows (on average) for years, and OSX as well until recently. (java 1.4 performance on OSX was dismal)

Re:that's odd

[Dr.Merkwurdigeliebe]

If MS put it in a VM, then it's an MS issue ...

Java on desktop has been irrelevant for a while

[BigGerman]

Now, if they tested webapps performance, say on Tomcat on both OSes, the results would be quite different. I would guess Vista would be faster for a single thread test but would not scale at all.

Re:Fairness

[jellomizer]

By your argument Linux in theory should be light-years faster then Windows Mac OS or any other OS. However there are things that are slow in Linux. Why is Open GL so slow. Couln't you make MesaGL faster and more compatible with OpenGL.

You may be at the mercy of Microsoft yes Microsoft may not care about Java vs. its own .NET platform. However if Microsoft could whip Linux in Java Performance they would love it. Fine Vista loss these benchmark but the excusing the one area it did win was in very poor taste.

Re:I was surprised

[LWATCDR]

You shouldn't be.
Most java development these days takes place on the server side. Linux is has a large precentage of the server market. Then you must know that Sun is a Unix company. They push Solaris and java on Solaris. Solaris is a lot more like Linux than Windows. The the final piece is that in the Windows server market Java shares space with .net.
So as far as the amount of attention I would say that Solaris/Linux/Unix gets just as much attention as Windows does.