The folks over at BugLabs have been one of the earliest and most serious adopters of phoneME - they are using phoneME as the basis for their core product. Lately, they have done a series of performance tests to compare phoneME with other open source VMs such as Cacao and jamVM. They just published their second round of results after some tuning and turning on the phoneME JIT compiler.

As you can see from the graphs phoneME is quite competitive even without the JIT compiler - but with JIT enabled phoneME outperforms its closest competitor by a factor of 1.7x to almost 2x depending on the benchmark.

And because the phoneME team has spent years optimizing the VM for small footprint and high performance (not just top speed but also start-up- and interactive performance) the JIT compiler carries a very reasonable overhead in terms of memory budget and optimization time. To witness, here is a blog by the Jalimo team which talks about phoneME running on Maemo and OpenMoko FreeRunner. phoneME starts a "Hello World" application in only 250 ms and a SWT demo application in 4 seconds.

Thanks to BugLabs for the great and detailed performance work. And: phoneME rocks! ;-)

Cheers,

-- Terrence