As a follow-up of my previous post, I've cleaned up my benchmark code (the log files have been reduced in size from 40MB to 800kB, some bugs have been fixed and the UUID strategy has been chosen for generating primary keys in the database, thus reducing contention chances with multiple threads).

At this point the impact of logging should be neglectable, thus the comparison makes more sense (if you haven't read my previous post, the test reads metadata from about 150+ photos and insert them into a Derby database, with both single- and multi-thread approaches; the test is run with different software combinations but always on the same hardware, my MacBook Pro first generation, 2GHz, 2GB RAM; numbers are seconds per photo, the lower the better).

Workers Linux Ubuntu 8.04               Windows XP                      Mac OS X 10.5
        Java 1.6.0_06   Java 1.5.0_15   Java 1.6.0_05   Java 1.5.0_15   SoyLatte 1.0.2  Java 1.5.0_13
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1       0.50/0.35       0.55/0.47       0.48/0.37       0.52/0.47       0.80/0.66       0.80/0.74
2       0.40/0.26       0.42/0.42       0.32/0.25       0.34/0.33       0.49/0.43       0.47/0.50
3       0.39/0.26       0.41/0.42       0.32/0.25       0.43/0.39       0.48/0.43       0.52/0.53
4       0.39/0.25       0.41/0.45       0.31/0.26       0.45/0.41       0.49/0.43       0.53/0.55

In this round of tests I introduced a double benchmarking for every platform, by using both the "Client" JIT (java -client) and the "Server" one (java -server).  Here are some points:

1. I discovered my ignorance in a basic aspect of the configuration of the VM. While I presumed that by default the "Client" JIT was always selected, I learned that this isn't necessarily true since Java 5. This document clearly states that when running in machines defined as "server-class" (at least 2 processors/cores and 2GB of RAM, and my MacBook Pro falls within this class) the default JIT is the Server one. 
2. In spite of that, the Server JIT is selected by default only on Linux. Window XP and Mac OS X still select the "Client" one. While we are somewhat used to Apple's policy of doing things differently, Windows is a bit of a surprise because it's another Sun-made VM.
3. This explains a big deal of the differences seen in my previous round of benchmarks: Linux resulted the winner since it was the only one running with the Server JIT, which is clearly the best option since the benchmark doesn not use any guy, but does repetitive tasks.

So at least part of the surprise in the previous set of numbers has gone. But several new questions arise:

1. Comparing Java 5 VMs omogeneously (Client JIT vs Client JIT and Server JIT vs server JIT) Mac OS X still has the worse performance.
2. Turning the Server JIT on Mac OS X and other operating systems does almost no good: small improvements with a single processor, and no improvements at all with multiple processors (indeed, it also looks like there's a slight degradation of performance in some cases).
3. After the verbose logging went off, SoyLatte Client JIT is no better than Apple's JVM. Server JIT for SoyLatte is marginally better, but much slower than Linux or Windows.

At first sight, one could argue that the Server JIT does not bring advantages on any operating system, but the bad performance of SoyLatte is raising doubts about Mac OS X. Is there anything specific in Mac OS X that makes things go worse (again, maybe the file system performance)? Or, given that SoyLatte is still young, a lot of optimizations have been disabled?

The instructions to reproduce this are in my previous post, this time you must use -r 5368 for checking out the blueMarine code.

In any case, at least with Windows and Linux I'm reaching my performance goal, which is 0.20 seconds per photo. Indeed, considering some known issues of my code, I should be able to make better than it.
*** Edited to add:

To make things easier to read, I'm adding a table with normalized values. The percentages indicates how slow a test runs (e.g. 100% means that it runs at half speed). Best performers are marked in green, worse performes in red; also a specific comparison among Java 5 only VMs is given. In each column pair, the "Client" JIT figure is at the left side, the "Server" JIT figure at the right.