the corner office

As you could guess from my previous post, it's JVM muckabout time. I've been having grrrr moments with Sun's 1.5 JVM the past few nights, after finally getting around to upgrading my home box from Java 1.4. After a heap of googling and forum scouring, I've come to the conclusion that Linux AMD64 users are either all running hopelessly over-powered machines, or they don't have very high expections of Java.

The problem boils down to the fact that Sun's 1.5 JVM for 64-bit platforms doesn't come with a client HotSpot VM, only the Server version. But as Sun's own documentation says, a 'server' class machine should have at least 2 CPUs and 2 gigs of RAM. What that means is that more modest AMD64s are biting off a touch more than they can initially chew when they fire up a 1.5 JVM.

Using Eclipse is ridiculously slow - mouse juddering slow. Starting up Tomcat via MyEclipse with my collection of web apps takes about 5 seconds using IBM's 1.4.2 JVM. Using Sun's 1.5 JVM slows things down to 15-20 seconds, which is just insane. Over time the server VM's performance would even out and be the better bet, but if you're starting and stopping Tomcat a lot, which is typical for lots of edit/tweak/break/edit work, you're never going to benefit from it.

Thankfully, IBM's 64 bit 1.5 JDK has debuted in the Gentoo world, so here's hoping that'll solve my problems. Installing it (and for bonus marks, getting the java-config tool to play nicely with it) is tonight's job.