Benchmarking the Java Virtual Architecture

In this chapter we present a study of the SPEC JVM98 benchmark suite at a dynamic platform-independent level. The results presented describe the influence of class library code, the relative importance of various methods in the suite, as well as the sizes of the local variable, parameter and operand stacks. We also examine the dynamic bytecode instruction usage frequencies, and discuss their relevance. The influence of the choice of Java source to bytecode compiler is shown to be relatively insignificant at present. These results have implications for the coverage aspects of the SPEC JVM98 benchmark suites, for the performance of the Java-to-bytecode compilers, and for the design of the Java Virtual Machine