Another toy benchmark...

Mon Feb 27 19:01:00 GMT 2006

On Wed, 2006年02月22日 at 14:31 +0100, Norman Hendrich wrote:
> Hello all,
>> yet another toy benchmark... You can download the source code from here:
>> http://tams-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/personal/hendrich/GameOfLife.java
>> The demo consists of a modified form of Conway's famous "game of life". The
> modification is a slight random term that avoids the typical "+++" cycles
> and attractors of the original game. The game board is displayed in a Swing
> JPanel after each iteration, and the specified milliseconds "sleep" interval
> is inserted after each iteration. (This is a quick hack, and the background
> thread is not 100% safe. Also, a sparse-matrix representation of the gaming
> board might be better. Matlab uses this.)
>> <java> GameOfLife -sleep <millis>
>> gcj --main=GameOfLife -O3 -d . GameOfLife.java
> ./a.out -sleep <millis>
>>> Iterations per second: (Athlon 2600+, SuSE Linux 8.2)
>> JDK 1.4.2 JDK 1.5.0 JDK 1.6.0 JDK 1.6.0 jamvm+cp gcj 4.2.0
> -client -client -client -server -O3
>>> -sleep 50 16.66 16.66 16.66 16.66 3.99 3.20
> -sleep 20 33.33 33.33 33.33 33.00 5.20 3.30
> -sleep 5 50.00 50.00 50.00 50.00 5.20 3.30
> -sleep 0 ~1900.00 ~2000.00 ~2000.00 ~2200.00 31.25 200 ..
> 2000
>> Conclusions:
>> 1. the JDKs somehow limit repaints to about 50 fps max, and probably use
> time-slicing in 8.33 msec intervals to assign repaint slots.
>> 2. Newer versions of the JDK slightly improve raw performance.
>> 3. jamvm+classpath is a pure interpreter, and loses this benchmark.
>> 4. Raw calculation performance of gcj+classpath is not bad at all, but AWT
> seems to be severely crippled. A factor of 15 slowdown (50/3.3) is not
> always acceptable...
>> Please let me hear whether you can reproduce those numbers. Any insights?

Can you file a bug for this with a test case?
Tom