VolanoMark findings

Wed Jan 29 15:21:00 GMT 2003

I recently retried building the VolanoMark benchmark found here:
http://www.volano.com/brenchmarks.html .
The good news is that it finally builds, and I closed the case against
this problem. I have no idea what the magic fix was. IIRC the compiler
couldn't handle the exception regions in the obfuscated class files.
The bad news is that IBM's JDK is twice as fast on this benchmark than
an optimized gcj build. My 2.3 GHz P4 gives IBM's 1.4 JDK a score of
12058, while we come in at half that: 6040.
I'm hoping that this may be mostly accounted for bugs. Unfortunately,
the VolanoMark is only distributed in .class form, so figuring this out
may take some doing.
BTW, if you try building/running VolanoMark, you will need to install it
using something other than gij/gcj. VolanoMark is distributed as a
self-extracting class file, but we seem to throw an IOException while
reading the archive. I'll file another bug for that.
AG