[Helma-user] file read and processing pretty slow. ideas?

[Joshua Paine]

Maksim Lin for technical support mailling lists wrote:
> Yep using gcj as a direct replacement for sun's "java" vm is definitely
> not the way to go.

LOL. I'd say that's an understatement. I didn't choose it--it was just 
preinstalled, and the Fedora documentation only said it worked as a 
drop-in Java replacement--no mention of the fact that you would have 
time to write your own jdk before execution would finish. For those of 
us who had never before explored actually running Java on Linux, it 
would be nice if they did like they do with graphics card drivers: 
"Here's the free driver we could include in the distribution. We're 
making progress, but it still doesn't work well for P, Q and R, so you 
might need to download the proprietary binary driver here."

> The benefits of using jcj are really only seen if you use it as a
> tradiional ahead-of-time compiler, to actually compile all your java
> code into a native executable 

I have yet to hear of a project that didn't run slower and *less* stably 
compiled with gcj, and I thought I recently heard something about the 
head gcj dev discontinuing? So esp. with the below, maybe there's not 
much benefit to be had with gcj at all going forward?

> You might be happy to know that Sun has made Java 7 open source (under
> GPL license) though some parts of the JDK they could not release due to
> being third party code, so people (like Readhat/Fedora proj) are working
> on packaging it all up under the moniker of 'Icedtea' :
> http://fitzsim.org/blog/?p=17

I had heard about the open sourcing (though I had forgotten), but not 
Icedtea. That sounds great, although it's too bad about the name: iced 
tea is one of my running gags/references, and now [other exceptionally 
nerdy] people will think I'm talking about a Java distribution and not 
my favorite beverage.

-Joshua