BEA, JAAS and JRockit.
The BEA meeting tonight was good - I saw a couple old friends and enjoyed the good microbrews they had on tap during the meeting. The first presentation (PPT) was on JAAS, was presented by Rich Helton and gave a good overview of what JAAS is. I realized that I will probably never use it directly because I specialize in writing web applications, and the servlet API uses JAAS under the covers (via JDBCRealms, etc.). Not a very exciting presentation, but neither is the topic.
The second presentation was on JRockit, which is BEA's JVM. It's basically a BEA version of the JDK, but supposedly 4 times faster than Sun's Hotspot. The best part about it (to me) is that it has a "Management Console." This allows you to control the garbage collection algorithm, trace performance on methods, and setup notifications for events. You can find more documentation on this here. A very cool app to say the least. BEA's goal with JRockit is to fill the gap that Microsoft left when it quit creating the JVM for Intel platforms.
So to say the least, I was sold leaving the meeting - I could solve my JDK 1.4 problems, increase the speed of my applications by 4 times, and all would be groovy. I rushed home, installed JRockit and found the following (testing the current application I'm working on):
| Activity on current application | JDK 1.4.1 | JRockit 7.0 |
| Compiling index.jsp | 16 seconds | 9 seconds |
| Reloading index.jsp | 1/2 second | 1/2 second |
| Login and compile main menu | 16 seconds | 17 seconds |
| Logout and re-login | 4 seconds | 4.25 seconds |
| Tested on Windows XP SP1, Tomcat 4.0.5, 1Ghz RAM, 1.5 Ghz processor. | ||
Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed. Will I use it - sure, it seemed to be faster and my benchmarks above are simply me counting "1 1-thousand, 2 1-thousand..." The one thing I found disappointing was I couldn't get the jrockit.managementserver to start--even by adding -Djrockit.managementserver=true when starting Tomcat.
