Caveats to watch for in transition from Sun JVM to JRockit?

Question

We are thinking of transitioning a large product from relying on Sun's JVM to JRockit. I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to be a smooth transition (though I'd love to be wrong).

What issues should we watch out for or focus our regression testing on?

Answer 1

Well, of course you have unit tests right? :-)

I have used JRockit somewhat just for "fun" and have never had issues. From what I can see it is used in a number of apps of a wide variety so it should probably just work. It seems that it has also passed the JCK (the compatibility tests from Sun), so it should be smooth.

Areas that I would think of for breaking would be:

• garbage collector
• native code (JNI)
• file system handling, threading, etc... (unless they use the Sun library code)

The file system, threading, etc... are all the parts of the VM that integrate with the underlying OS. If they use the Sun code then less chance of issues.

I would bet that the transition does go smoothly.