Re: speed performances / hardware / cpu

From:

"Daniel Pitts" <googlegroupie@coloraura.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.java.machine

Date:

15 Nov 2006 18:20:26 -0800

Message-ID:

<1163643626.272710.72820@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>

antoine wrote:

Hello,

I'm developing / supporting a java "client" application (running on PCs
with XP pro, jre 1.5) which is a high performance trading client. it
receives market updates, displays them on screen (swing), does a serie
of computation, and performs several actions based on computated values
(order sending, cancelation, etc...). it is designed to run for 8 hours
straight without interruption, does not access any database, only uses
socket-based I/O, and is correctly multi-threaded.

I'm looking at upgrading our workstations, to hopefully get a speed
increase. currently, our "base computation" routine takes around 5ms
average, and I'm looking at reducing this number (I'm also looking at
improving CODE performances, but this post is about hardware).

currently we're running on dual CPU intel Xeon 2.8GHz, roughly 3 years
old, with 1GB RAM. virtual memory usage is around 128MB, so I believe
RAM is not an issue.

which kind of upgrade would sound smart to you ? I've seen technologies
like:
- all the "dual core" family
- 64-bit architecture (although no JVM for intel on XP pro 64-bit)
- simply pushing the frequency to 3.6GHz...

does 64-bit make sense ? or is it only for memory intensive application
(we're more concerned with execution speed) ?

any insight or link to any informative page would be most welcome !

thanks

-Antoine

Its hard to say without testing your particular code on the different
types of upgrades.
If your code can utilize multithreading effectively, I would probably
look into dual core (or quad processor) technologies.
There is a 64 bit JVM for Linux, and it might provide a boost.
Actually, just move to Linux may provide a slight boost.
Its really hard to say exactly what will be the most cost-effective
upgrade without actually testing results. I suggest you talk your
distributor into allowing you to run some custom benchmarks. Ofcourse,
the benchmarks should accurately reflect the profile of your
application.