VolanoMark findings

Wed Jan 29 15:34:00 GMT 2003

Anthony Green writes:
 > 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.
That's the same as I measured with Embedded CaffieneMark.
 > 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.
We already know what IBM do to get this perfomance:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/391/suganuma.html
* Method inlining. We do that, but only in special cases.
* Exception check elimination. We don't do that.
* Common subexpression elimination. We that.
* Removal of initialization checks.
* Removal of synchronization.
Andrew.