Wednesday February 15, 2006 Brian Doherty's Weblog
Wednesday February 15, 2006 Mustang Beta was made available today. Somehow, the Beta release almost seems a bit anti-climatic, as we've been making Mustang promoted builds available on java.net for quite a while now. Since Beta is based on build 59 (with some additional fixes), it hardly seems interesting if you've been downloading the snapshots on java.net. So, what's all the hub-a-bub about?
The term "Beta" implies something different than a promoted build. Every promoted build has gone through a pretty good amount of testing, both functional and performance related and they are generally stable. However promoted builds don't go through all the rigors of a Beta or GA release. A "Beta" goes through far more stringent testing, which is one reason why Mustang Beta is not exactly the same as build 59. Therefore, Beta implies a more stable and compliant release than a promoted build and will likely get looked at by more developers and ISVs than a promoted build. If you are on the bleeding edge and have been downloading and using the snapshot releases on a regular basis, Mustang Beta might not be interesting to you. However, if you are a bit more conservative and want something that's been more thoroughly tested, then Mustang Beta is for you!
On the performance front, Mustang Beta has some pretty exciting performance improvements on a wide array of benchmarks that we routinely measure. This is particularly true when comparing the performance to Java 5.0 Update 4 and earlier releases. Some of the performance enhancements in Mustang have been back-ported to Java 5.0 Update 5 and Update 6, so if you like what you see in Mustang Beta, you might also want to give Java 5.0 Update 6 a try.
I encourage you to take a look at the performance improvements in Mustang Beta and let us know what you find. There are a few things to watch out for, though. One of the big ones is that we now pick up your native font smoothing settings in Swing applications. This can result in some slowdowns in font rendering. The reward, of course, it better looking text, which we believed to be a reasonable trade-off. Another is the effects of biased locking on highly threaded applications with large amounts of lock contention. Biased Locking is on by default in Mustang. We're also still working on startup and footprint reductions, and later builds show more improvement than Mustang Beta.
If you find a performance issue with Mustang Beta, please give the latest snapshot release a try and see if it has already been fixed. We haven't been standing still since build 59, but if a performance problem persists in the latest snapshot, please file a bug or post a comment in the Java performance forum. We don't just want to hear about performance problems, though, so feel free to post about the improvements you've seen with Mustang Beta or any Mustang snapshot.
One more thing - if you find any compatibility or functionality regressions in Mustang, don't forget about the regression challenge! Hey, you might even win a prize!
Happy benchmarking!
[ T: http://technorati.com/tag/MustangBeta ]
Posted by briand ( Feb 15 2006, 08:57:27 AM CST ) Permalink
