Re: Xalan: gcj -vs- jre 1.3

["Anthony Green" <green@redhat.com>]

Cedric wrote:
> Do you understand, I hope, that this only measures the startup time
> of the VM.

Yes - of course. :-)   I thought I had put a caveat around it with "this kind
of batch processing".

> This is where GCJ shines and where GCJ will be very useful.

Yes.  My two other favorite benefits are (1) gcj may be available for targets
for which there are no JRE ports, and (2) tight-memory environments running
multiple java processes will benefit from having all of the library code in
shared libraries (and then there's the fact that it's Free software).

> Of course, nobody in is right mind will invoke the following command
> to transform XSL documents in a production environment.

Hmm.. why not?  This is almost exactly what "make htdocs" is going to do in
the rhug Makefile.  Do you just mean a production servlet environment?

> What would be interresting is to "daemonize" the process, and see
> how long it takes to transform a single document with a *running* VM.

Well, I just did another test with SAX2Count from Xerces.  It has a -w flag to
"warm up" the VM before timing.  I ran it on a large xml doc and they were
very close.  Gcj had a slight edge, but it was only about 15%.  Of course,
these benchmarks are somewhat meaningless because I'm not using the latest JRE
and the gcj library builds were not really tuned for performance.

> And also, of course, since you used the latest GCJ, would you care
> to do the same test with the latest JRE, which is 1.3.1_01 if I'm not
> mistaken?

I'm not all that motivated to do this.  I have easy access to the 1.3 version,
and the binary license for JRE 1.3.1 has some language that I don't understand
and find troublesome.

AG