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Killer facility or scenario that would make another JVM a better choice than the Sun JVM?

Asked 2009-11-01T08:04:34.593
23

For Java SE there are several JVM's available for running in production on x86:

plus some custom offerings for running on a server:

Other platforms:

  • Sun Solaris JVM - better scalability than x86?
  • (edit) GNU compiler for Java - http://gcc.gnu.org/java/ - can compile to native code on multiple platforms.

The Sun JVM has a distinct advantage with the jvisualvm program, which allows runtime inspection of running code. Is there any technical advantages of any other JVM that might make it a better choice for development and/or production?

In other words, is there a killer facility or scenario that would make any investment of time/effort/money worth it in another JVM?

(Please also suggest additional JVM's if they would be a good choice).

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2 Answers

7

Some applications, like financial and computational science would benefit greatly from hardware implementations of decimal floating point. IBM has rolled out a series of processors (POWER6, the z9 and z10 mainframes) which implement the IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point standard. The latest IBM JDK can use hardware acceleration for BigDecimals.

To allow developers to easily take advantage of the dedicated DFP hardware, IBM 
Developer Kit for Java 6 has built-in support for 64-bit DFP through the 
BigDecimal class library. The JVM seamlessly uses the DFP hardware when 
available to remove the need for computationally expensive software-based decimal
arithmetic, thus improving application performance.

It's a very fringe case, but if you have a z10 mainframe handy and want to use its decimal floating point unit in Java, then the IBM JVM would be a better choice than the Sun JVM.

-- Flaviu Cipcigan

answered 2009-12-29T18:18:52.217
3

Back in the Java 1.4 days my team used the IBM JVM for a high-volume, message-based system running on Linux. Why did we do this? Because we benchmarked the different JVMs! JRockit was actually the fastest, but it would occasionally crash, so not so great for production.

As always with these things, measure it!

answered 2009-11-01T13:55:16.673

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