OpenJDK: Performance Group

[David Herron]

alexanderschunk at t-online.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as David Herron already suggested it would be interesting to have a 
> "Performance Group" that deals with Java performance issues, including 
> start up times, application run time performance, memory management of 
> objects while running etc that is all the critical stuff of Java apps. 
> This would help understand why, i.g. some applications crash if they 
> run longer than a day - there was a bug in the bug database on this. 
>
>
> Tom was speaking about publishing some figures and i think it would be 
> interesting for developers - in particular those working on ports of 
> OpenJDK - to see how the JRE or VM and applications behave on 
> different plattforms. 
>
> Since there is currently no mailing-list for discussions on this just 
> consider this as an "experimantal" outline of Davids idea of a 
> Performance group.
>
> May be David can outline his initial idea a bit more.
>
> - Alex

Well it was an idea which popped up in the moment of writing that email, 
so I didn't give it any more thought than that.  However..  Performance 
is one of the key criticisms of the Java platform, which is why the 
performance virtual team has worked on this issue all these years.   
Like Quality it isn't about owning a module of code, it's about 
improving attributes of the overall thing.

To nitpick for a moment, a crash isn't about performance, it's about a 
bug.  It's just that some bugs occur after awhile of running e.g. if 
something were to be corrupted in the heap.

Anyway, mulling for a moment what a performance group might look like 
I'm having a hard time distinguishing what the internal performance 
virtual team does.  They have a set of methodologies they've defined for 
measuring various performance characteristics, most especially they've 
focused on startup time.  They have a set of tests they run to measure 
performance and startup time.  They have a reporting system to gather 
data on performance and startup time.  And the team is cross-functional 
because the issues cut across the whole platform.

- David Herron

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