Java 7 performance
I decided to compare Java 6 & 7 performance for $employer’s $application. Java 7 performs better — as expected. What I did not expect, was that the difference would be so big. Around 10% on average. That’s not bad for something as simple as a version bump.
Ideally I’d like to investigate where this difference comes from.
$application uses Apache Solr rather extensively. In fact, most of the time querying is spent in Solr. With indexing it’s probably about 50% of the time. With querying it’s probably closer to 90%. All tests are run in a controlled environment, so I have a fair amount of confidence in these results.
The indexing test inserts 3 million documents in Solr. Creating these documents takes up the bulk of the time. It involves a lot of filesystem access – something which Java versions have very little influence over –, and heavily multi-threaded CPU-intensive processing.
If you’re not using Java 7, you really should consider upgrading. If you’re stuck with people who live in the past, maybe you can convince them with a bunch of pretty performance graphs of your own.
— Elric