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Java Performance: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

Posted by phoronix on · 7 comments
Phoronix; By Michael Larabel
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Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative.

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Comments (7)

I ran Windows 2000 and SuSE 7.3 and 8.0 on identical Dells for a while, 5 years ago. The linux box was noticeably faster. Windows 2000 still crashed or got totally hung once in a while, which required reboots.

I've never been skeptical about Linux vs Windows performance since them.
I'd like to throw in some other versions of Linux: Gentoo, Arch or Frugalware for an i686 binary distribution, and Slackware as an i486 binary distribution. My guess is that any of these would probably be (at least a little bit) faster than Ubuntu.
Oh, an vary the hardware a little bit: a single core 1.8 GHz with 512 MB of RAM, for instance.
Agreed. It's very nice to have it measured and quantified, but once you've experienced the difference you'll never doubt how the numbers are gonna come out again.

My workstation here at work is a retired Win95/98 machine from a client who had to upgrade to XP, it's a 600mhz Celeron with 384mb of RAM, and it runs Etch like a dream. There is the slightest delay when an application starts to run, but it runs great once it's up. It even ran Etch pretty good before I upgraded the then-64mb of RAM.
> it's a 600mhz Celeron with 384mb of RAM, and it runs Etch like a dream

Yes, that's plenty powerful for regular tasks. I doubt you're running gnome or kde though.
Nice and all that, but...

This just says that Linux can outperform the nastiest, hoggiest Windows ever. That's damning with faint praise.
To be entirely fair, running the Java VM doesn't give any operating system much room to shine.

To get a true grip on performance diffs you have to do something like rijelkentsaurus does: run linux on an older PC. I'm typing this on a 700-MHz "Coppermine" based Gateway PC, with 384 MB, that I got for free. Runs like a champ under Slackware 12.0, compared to my 1.8 GHz office machine, Windows XP SP2. It can't run IE7 with more than 3 tabs without spending most of its cycles paging and paging .... and paging. XP SP2 wouldn't even run on the Slackware box, I think.

Performance comparisons abound actually: http://www.wafu.ne.jp/~yaz/p5.html

But they never get any airplay. Also, an academic paper, although impressive to the Insider, does nothing to your average Windows sap. They can wave it away as "egghead nonsense".

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