JVM Ergonomics

[Joseph D Carroll Jr]

I am working on a blog post about the JVM ergonomics and I am a little
stuck.  The blog post is related to Eclipse and the runtime arguments it
uses.  I am looking for the point at which the detected ergonomic settings
are merged with the command line arguments, does the VM parse the command
line args first or determine the ergonomics first (when all of that
occurs).  I am also looking for how the JVM detects what ergonomic settings
it should use, I realize that this will be platform specific.  However, I
cannot seem to find any technical documentation about these topics beyond
that of a general ergonomics overview and after reviewing the source of
openJDK I haven't been able to determine anything.

Would someone have any insight into this or know who I would be able to
speak with that could point me in the right direction?

My objective is to create(/propose) a process where you are able to
configure the Eclipse launchers with something like
--launcher.MaxHeapNotLessThan=512M in the Eclipse launcher configuration.
 This would result in a platform specific call to determine the underlying
hardware configuration much in the same way the JVM does.  Then, a number
of simple checks could be performed and the JVM could be launched with the
optimal arguments.

Eclipse presently defines a number of vm args that, in my opinion, are
sub-optimal.  I also do not feel that many people are aware of the
ergonomic functionality.  So the blog post is going to describe ergonomics,
give a little more detail than normal with some performance comparisons,
and then I was going to propose the above change.

Any comments / questions / or anything else is certainly welcome.

Thanks,

JD