With the pressure on Java's performance mounting to the point of scandal, credible, correct benchmarking tools take center stage to measure innovation. Towards that end Volano LLC, makers of the first 100% Pure Java chat solution, announced last week general release of VolanoMark, a new server-side Java benchmarking tool for assessing the speed and stability of any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Based on the company's 100% Pure Java communications engine, VolanoMark aims to give Java developers and Volano customers a means for evaluating Java on the server side. VolanoMark is available now at no charge from Volano's Web site.
"When our largest VolanoChat customers started hitting Java performance limitations last year, they turned to us for advice," said John Neffenger, chief technology officer of Volano. "In order to determine which platforms offered the best performance in terms of capacity, throughput, and stability, we developed VolanoMark."
Benchmarking Server-Side Java
Developed to evaluate the performance of multi-user Java applications like Volano's flagship VolanoChat products, VolanoMark is the ideal benchmarking tool for server-side Java performance measurements. Although the CaffeineMark applet by Pendragon Software has been widely adopted for evaluating Java performance in browsers, Java server applications for multi-user environments require a different kind of benchmark to accurately assess JVM performance.
Multi-user Java servers tend to be highly multi-threaded, with at least one thread per connection, and highly networked, with a high number of long lasting socket connections. In addition, these applications must be highly stable and highly scalable, capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of concurrent client connections without any degradation in response time.
Using Volano's Java-based communications engine, VolanoMark creates ten groups of 20 connections each for a total of 200 connections with the server. Each client connection takes turns broadcasting 100 messages to its respective group. Upon completion, VolanoMark reports the score as the average number of messages transferred per second. For example, testing JVM performance for Sun's Java Developers' Kit (JDK 1.1) on a 200 MHz PentiumPro machine with 128Mbytes of RAM yields a VolanoMark of 174.
Vendors Use VolanoMark to Tune JVMs
A version of VolanoMark has been licensed by a number of leading Java vendors, including Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Novell, Silicon Graphics, SCO, Softway, SuperCede, and Sun Microsystems. These vendors have been using VolanoMark to optimize their respective Java implementations for highly threaded, highly networked Java applications. Through the introduction of JIT compilers, native thread support, and other general-purpose performance enhancements, server-side Java performance has improved by as much as 30-fold over the past year.
"We have evaluated almost every JVM released this year, and have reluctantly become experts in server-side Java performance metrics," said Neffenger. "We are sharing this expertise by making VolanoMark available to everyone free of charge. Now anyone will be able to evaluate the performance of their Java server platform."
In December, the company will release test results comparing the performance of the major JVMs. "This is an important stage in Java's life", said J. P. Morgenthal, Java Computing Analyst with NC.Focus. "A group has single-handedly taken it upon themselves to test the true core of the virtual machine. These results will demonstrate who the real leaders in virtual machine development really are."
The test results will be supported with a comprehensive research report covering the scalability, stability, and performance ratings of all major JVMs. This report should be of interest to any corporation considering the deployment of server-side Java applications.
About Volano
Volano LLC, Founded in 1996, is the leading supplier of 100% Pure Java chat server solutions. The privately held company is based in San Francisco, California, with customer server installations in 21 countries throughout the world. A free evaluation and demonstration of VolanoChat is available on Volano's Web site or by calling (415) 587-4297 for more information.
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