Speed of Java (was: Linux on old laptop in two stages)

[Richard Soule]

Ben Scott wrote:

 >  My measurement is qualitative, not quantitative.  Everything that
 > uses Java that I've ever encountered on any machine takes a long time
 > to start and uses up gobs and gobs of memory, regardless of how
 > trivial the program.  Interactive programs all have a somewhat
 > unresponsive UI, and go non-responsive for seconds at a time at
 > seemingly random intervals.

I use Oracle JDeveloper (free as in beer: 
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html) quite a bit 
and I've not noticed the problems that you have other than taking a 
'long time' to start, maybe... Certainly no more than any other very 
large and  sophisticated IDE. JDeveloper is written in Java.

JDeveloper includes a code profiler that will help you write better Java 
code. When the developers finished the code profiler they ran the 
JDeveloper product code through the profiler and got a pretty noticeable 
improvement in performance.

There are more than 6000 Oracle Applications (Oracle Applications, 
Siebel, PeopleSoft, and a bunch of other companies we've acquired over 
the years) developers at Oracle who are using JDeveloper and they all 
want their tools to run fast. They wouldn't be happy with the kind of 
performance that you describe below.

Not only that, but the developers who write the other tools at Oracle 
(Portal, XML Publisher, BPEL Designer, etc.) all use JDeveloper, many on 
Linux.

My own personal experience:

I've got a 1.6GHz Pentium laptop with 2GB of ram and I'm able to run the 
below in quite a usable manner:

Windows XP Professional base operating system
VMWare image with the following:
Windows XP Professional OS
Oracle Enterprise Edition 10g
Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition 10g
Oracle BPEL Process Manager
Oracle JDeveloper

That's a LOT of software to run on a 2GB machine.

I've also run JDeveloper on a Linux VM running X and didn't notice the 
kind of performance you are describing below.

JDeveloper is a great big huge Java program that you can download for 
free... Want to give it a try and let us know what you think?

Rich