Chet Haase's Blog

Smaller is better? What about Faster?

There are a few questions in the world that you can pretty much get guaranteed answers to:

• Would you like a lot of money?
• Would you like a sock in the mouth?
• Do you want the last donut?

• Do you want Java to start up faster?
• Do you want your Java application to take up less space in memory?
• Do you want the last donut? (Some questions are universal)

Of course, the reality of software development is that there are not infinite resources you can shovel into solving every problem, and that a fix in one area may have tradeoff implications in others. For example, what if I said I could make your app start up 10% faster, but it would cost you 10% more memory footprint - is this worth the tradeoff to you?

It is for this reason that we recently posted a survey, to attempt to get a reality check on what problems you are having, and what your priorities are that you'd like us to think about.

Yes, it's a survey. Sorry about that. I'd prefer not to have a survey about this because, let's face it, noone actually likes surveys except the people on the phone that are paid to adminster them. And even they hate them. But we really do need to ask a bunch of questions and get a bunch of answers ... and that pretty much left us with a survey. That, or one of those eightball fortune telling things from my childhood, but I'd rather not set the future of J2SE development on that rather tenuous decision process.

So please, please, please take a few minutes and fill out this survey. The data will be used. It will help drive priorities and realities for the engineering group looking into these exact issues.

Comments

• Mmm... Socks..
  

  Posted by: trembovetski on April 05, 2005 at 09:40 PM

• Go for speed, and encourage the recently-announced (on java.sun.com) MVM ("Multi-processing Virtual Machine") to be integrated into Mustang so that there are no more worries about memory footprint.

  Posted by: chris_e_brown on April 06, 2005 at 04:48 AM

• I'd like a user not to think his computer is broken because 1.5 is doing so much optimization before starting.

  I'd like Java to support HTML 4.0 in standard Swing.

  Posted by: pwc on April 06, 2005 at 09:32 AM

• Some people like surveys. I do.

  Posted by: keithkml on April 06, 2005 at 09:44 AM

• The lowest option is "< 500 MHz" and "< 256 MB" and I've been trying to make my apps run on 300 MHz / 64Mb boxen (and been hoping to run them on even older boxes). Ouch.

  Sometimes you just can't win. :-P

  Posted by: afishionado on April 06, 2005 at 10:25 AM

• Ill-defined thought for the day: in general, startup time is important to me for an applet, but not so important for a standalone or JNLP app. It Would Be Nice If the VM could be tailored along these lines as well as -server vs. -client.

  Posted by: ljnelson on April 06, 2005 at 11:43 AM

• I don't want the last donut. It's probably been touched by everyone and then put back.

  Posted by: jzacker on April 06, 2005 at 03:34 PM

• I think a survey is a good choice for you

  Posted by: shiwei_yin on April 06, 2005 at 06:14 PM

• Be sure to check out these performance related events at JavaOne:

  7984 Java Platform Performance
  Session ID: 7984,
  Room: Gateway 102/103.
  Date: 28-JUN-05,
  Start Time: 11:00 AM
  BOF 9970 Meet the Sun Java Technology and J2EE Performance Experts
  Monday 8:30pm, Marriott, Golden Gate, B2
  more to come...
  

  Posted by: tmarble on June 23, 2005 at 04:35 PM

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