Performance of IcedTea 6 vs Sun's HotSpot 6

Question

How does IcedTea 6's performance stand up against Sun's own HotSpot on linux systems? I tried searching Google but Phoronix's test is the best I got, which is almost a year old now. Hopefully things have improved since then.

Also, once Sun completely open sources the JVM, would it be possible to implement it for Linux platforms such that a main module (Quickstarter in the Consumer JRE) starts up with the OS and loads the minimal Java kernel, regardless of any Java apps running. And then progressively load other modules as necessary. Might improve startup times.

Answer 1

so it will be within the answer: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=java_vm_performance&num=1 and http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=os_threeway_2008&num=1

I'd expect SUN's stuff to be faster, but it really depends on all kinds of optimizations, so one version might be faster doing operation X, but in the next version it might not be as fast..

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EDIT: regarding kernel preloading: on linux you may use preload or alternatives to speed up app loading, without affecting the overall system performance (loading a Quickstarter equivalent will keep memory occupied at all times). Also, as far as i know, java loads lots of shared libraries, that are shared between apps, so i don't really see the point of building in-kernel support for this thing. I guess its easy to make a simple app that loads some libraries and does nothing after that(quickstarter), but i dont see this doing a big difference when loading apps, and in some cases it might even slow down the system(i'm thinking about ram usage, and memory swapping)