At its annual users’ conference, BEA Systems Inc. unveiled a Real Time Edition of its WebLogic application server and a WebLogic server enterprise-grade kernel. BEA also plans to provide more application-level detail through WebLogic Server 9.0 and extended support for open source Java frameworks, including Eclipse Web Tools, Apache Beehive and Apache XML Beans.

Read BEA gears up for runtime SOA

Some BEA people were telling me about this here at BEA World this week. With the new BEA jRockit, you can now get GC pauses guaranteed not to exceed some setting, e.g. no more than 15ms!

Very, very nice!

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: The Java Data Grid

Can we use JRockit for a production site for free?

Thanks!
Lofi.

The "Buy" column on this page says so - http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=start.htm&FP=/content/products/jrockit/

Cheers,
Ravi...

Yes you can, and probably should. :)

Bill Roth
BEA Systems.

We will install and try JRockit. Hope to be able to run OpenUSS better than using Sun JVM :-)

Cheers,
Lofi.
www.openuss.org

Hi,

I have used JRockit since its version of 1.4.2. Jrockit is easier to tune and so it look like better performance than SUN JVM. However, I always find JRockit always core dump in random when I long run the application for few days. This kind of core dump happened in my own writing code or using other commerical software vender such as messaging queue. When I reported this to those software vendors, the vendors only tell their software is stable tested on SUN and so this must be your JVM problems. This core dump is still occurring sometimes in latest JRockit 1.5 version. Thus, I have stopped to use it in production as none customer accepts these kind of unpredictable cores dump. Recently, I found if you carefully reading SUN JVM Tunning Docuemnt, the current SUN JVM 5 Update 5 is nearly as fast as JRockit but it show more stable-- at least will not core dump after few days.

All software has bugs. If you or your vendor reports this issue to us chances are that we will fix it quickly.

The message we get from our customers is that JRockit is preceived as very stable. Some switch from Sun to JRockit because of that. However, I won't claim that is because we are more stable than Sun - it's more likely that we just have a different set of bugs.

Henrik, JRockit team

With the new BEA jRockit, you can now get GC pauses guaranteed not to exceed some setting, e.g. no more than 15ms!Very, very nice!

Good news for Eclipse users! :)

This is really interesting. The predictable response times where the major issue we detected on switching our business logic to Java objects. We have to be able to answer in less than a second which was not possible with the SUN VM. I'll try the BEA stuff when it arrives.

I've always liked JRockit a lot. We use it for a couple of projects that have pretty demanding requirements when it comes to performance and JRockit helps a lot there. Can't tell you any specific numbers, but it's worth trying it out for demanding apps.

Is BEA saying that the GC will occur within 15ms or will take less than 15ms of CPU time?

In other words, does jRockit support JSR 1 (Java Real-Time spec) or is the jRockit 15ms guarantee based on the clock time available to the JVM? Is this hard real-time or soft real-time? Just trying to understand product positioning.

FYI, Sun does have a hard real-time JVM for hard real time applications, which has moved from a research project to a commercial product.

John Clingan
Sun Microsystems

Is BEA saying that the GC will occur within 15ms or will take less than 15ms of CPU time?

The GC pause caused by a mark pass is configurable to not exceed a certain specified time, in which 15ms is just an example configuration that Mark Carges used to explain the feature to me.

It is not "hard real time", but rather "soft real time", so I doubt that it meets the JSR requirements that you highlighted.

Out of curiousity, is the JVM that you describe able to run large J2EE servers (e.g. WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.) and existing applications with such real time guarantees?

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Powering the world's busiest Java sites

Customers are using it with J2EE servers, unfortunately I don't know which ones.

John Clingan
Sun Microsystems

Well if that has been in an actual press releasse ("hey, look we now (version 9!) offer an enterprise grade kernel!") I am hardly pressed to imagine the amount of butt kicking going on in BEAs public relations office :-).