Characterizing Java™ application performance

Managed runtime are becoming standard execution environments for a variety of applications written in Java, C# etc. Comprehending their performance is a very challenging exercise since these applications spend time not only in user written code, but in system libraries, the underlying runtime, dynamic compilers, native libraries, and operating system services. In this paper we describe our work in providing a model to comprehend the JRE (Java Runtime Environments) application performance. We validate this model with measurement and analysis of a wide variety of Java applications (industry standard benchmarks such as SPEC JVM98, real server-side Java applications (Java Servlet Engine TomCat), interactive graphical applications (swing based GUI)) on the SGI IRIX platform. We also developed new benchmarks for measuring and characterizing GUI performance. Each of the benchmarks have surprisingly different characteristics and so do the real world applications. We hope this paper will provide the necessary framework and a blueprint for application developers to characterize their applications.