This year at JavaOne we had a demo at the performance pod demonstrating Java SE performance and scalability. We had a Sun Fire T2000 with a 1.0 Ghz UltraSPARC T1 processor and 8gb RAM running Sun J2SE 5.0_06, J2SE 5.0_08, and Java SE 6. Brian Doherty did the setup this year (thanks a lot Brian!). He spent the entire day on Monday fighting the networking issues on the JavaOne pavilion floor but was eventually able to get the demo working (but we had to buy our own USB to serial kit to do it). It was also quite cold in the building, and Brian didn't bring his jacket because of the 80 degree weather that day in San Francisco. So, just like any resourceful engineer working in a lab, Brian decided to warm his hands with the fan exhaust in the back of the Sun Fire T2000. Much to his surprise, the T2000 was blowing cold air! Over the next few days on the show floor we put the system to the test. We ran SPECjbb2005 every day for 10 hours straight with the CPU fully consumed at 100%. Guess what? It still blew cold air. This was absolutely amazing, especially since my little laptop is about to burn my legs as I type this... I find this incredible. At risk of being a bit annoying I asked nearly everyone who stopped by our booth to put their hands by the fans and feel the air. I wasn't the only one amazed, many people wanted to the the CPU stats to be sure the system was running full tilt. Very cool. (literally).

I love performance work. The sweet taste of knowing that your product is the fastest is like no other. Perhaps it is because I have a competitive personality, but beating the competition is a lot of fun. And you know what? Active competition between vendors on public Java benchmarks benefits customers. So without further ado, I'd like to announce our latest round of world record Java competitive benchmark results. Sun J2SE 5.0_08, powered by the ripping fast Sun HotSpot JVM, has new world records running SPECjbb2005, improving our previous scores on the exact same hardware by a whopping 17%, and publishing the improved score in less than 6 months. See what I mean by sweet? The BMSeer has a great piece on the new results, check it out here. Be sure to check out the very popular press release here. To top it off, performance is not Sun Java Software's highest priority. I'm sure you're well aware that performance optimization is my highest priorty, but really its not the top focus of the organization as a whole. Our primary foci are reliability , compatibility (but performance and scalability are not that far down the list). We would pass up a 20% performance gain at the drop of a hat if it imposed any reliability risk. I do mean any risk, as a performance guy I've butted heads with this ideology many times in the past. But you know what, in the end I agree, because that's what customers need. Reliability is always first. Brian Doherty, an esteemed colleague of mine has often said, “The performance of a crashing JVM is zero”, and that's dead on. A close second is compatibility, but that's an easy one as it speaks to the core of what defines Java technology. I'm proud to say Sun has taken this to heart, we support more hardware and OS combinations than any other vendors, Any JVM vendor can claim they are the “World's fastest JVM”. Competitive benchmarking is a lot of fun and is an opportunity to promote software and hardware performance. What's important is that your application is as fast as you need it to be, and its so reliable that you don't have to think about it.