Comments on: Performance Benchmark Results: JVM vs CLR

By: Terry

Terry — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:12:59 +0000

Actually the .net results for the SciMark 2.0 Bench mark are out dated, and use a 1.0 version of .net.
Out of curiosity, I ran the results on an XP box, using my 1.5 Java JRE, and .net 1.1, and .net 2.0 beta two, and here are the composite scores.
Java 1.5: 230
.Net 2.0 C#: 356
.Net 2.0 C: 616
.Net 1.1 C#: 340
.Net 1.1 C: 575
Note for the Java time, I just ran the bench mark off the web, so it may have incurred some
browser over head.
Personally, math oriented tests such as these can be misleading, as the two libraries can have such a wide variety of implementation, accuracy ect. Its not always a valid comparison. I’d love to see the see the SPEC JVM98 benchmark ported to C#.
I’ll admit to being a .net fan, as well as Java, but I find .net to be generally 5-15% more performant then Java, which makes sense to me considering the CLR is designed specially for the windows platform, where as Java needs to provide cross platform support. I’m not sure what Sam’s point is. It seems valid to ask, you have a box, what runs similar tasks faster on it, the clr, or the jvm? I would be curious to see if java would have better performance ruining on the same physical box with Linux, instead of xp.

By: Steven Shaw

Steven Shaw — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 18:25:47 +0000

Perhaps the .NET proponent was just ignorant of the state of the art on the Java platform. But it’s possible that he was having trouble communication about how on the CLR, the JIT is always used to produce native code. MSIL is never interpretted by the CLR whereas on the JVM, bytecode is often interpreted until hotspot identifies a method as requiring jitting.
Also worth keeping in mind that the Microsoft JVM was the first to include a JIT, IIRC.

By: Greg Luck

Greg Luck — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:11:22 +0000

Note that I did not run any benchmarks. That is a breach of Microsoft’s EULA. I am reporting performance from another website.

By: Me

Me — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 20:53:41 +0000

You used VMWare to run the benchmarks? There goes your credibility! Did you run both the Java and C# code on the same stack?

By: Dafydd Rees

Dafydd Rees — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 02:30:17 +0000

This is meaningless. Are they saying that the CLR is faster executing the same sequence of instructions on the same operating system as the JVM? Surely they don’t have the same instruction set so it’s impossible to compare “speed” directly. It’s just like comparing the “speed” of an Intel chipset with, say a G5. Clock speed alone means nothing – depends on what instructions are executing during each “tick” and efficiently they were compiled from the source code. If we could comare differently specified VMs for speed, I wonder if Cincom Smalltalk VM would beat both the CLR and the JVM. They’ve been doing this a lot longer than Sun or Microsoft.

By: Sam Pullara

Sam Pullara — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 10:15:24 +0000

Java: 324+413 = 737
.NET: 240+282= 522

By: Robert Watkins

Robert Watkins — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 10:05:01 +0000

Actually, the real reason why the CLR is “faster” than the JVM (for certain tasks, of course) is that Microsoft push a lot more tasks down to the native infrastructure that Windows provides. In other words, it does a lot less inside the CLR than Java does inside the JVM.
While Microsoft focus on a single platform for the CLR, this is a logical choice for performance improvements.

By: Look again

Look again — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 09:23:40 +0000

You need to look again. The number your cite aren’t quite right, and your math is wrong — 240 + 282 != 695. It’s 522, making JDK 1.5 41% faster than .net on the combine mflops.
Of course, you can’t really add mflops like you did, but the numbers do indicate that for math, the JDK is about 40% faster.