hotspot inlining decision seems to be random

[Christian Thalinger]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 12:22 +0100, Ulf Zibis wrote:
> The Problem I have is, how to reliably see the effect of my code changes 
> on the resulting performance.
> For example, in [3] (at the end) you can see, that 
> highSurrogate(char,char) is much faster than highSurrogate(int), if 
> inlined. If not inlined [1],[2], it's opposite.
> So how can I reliably force the inlining of method highSurrogate(...) as 
> too as of decode(...) for my benchmark testing?
> -XX:MaxInlineSize=250 seems not reliable

OK, I think we should talk about what you really want to do.  I guess
you want to write some code that is faster than what's currently in the
JDK.  But I also guess you want that everyone else who is using your
code has the same good (or better) performance than you have, right?

Tuning around with inlining knobs is probably good for your particular
micro-benchmark on your particular hardware.  But (almost) all other
people run HotSpot with it's default inline settings...

Your should think about if it's really worth tuning around so much at
this level or if it wouldn't be better to spend more time on
changing/factorizing your Java code that HotSpot can optimize your code
for everybody. 

-- Christian