Running on a Sun Ultra 60 computer, in July of this year, the Exact VM generated the highest submitted SPECJava score of any JVM in the industry. On multi-processor systems, the ExactVM/Solaris combination scales to achieve a higher VolanoMark score than any other system of which we are aware.

The Java Topics Group in Sun Labs started the ExactVM as a research project into the problems surrounding high performance, exact garbage collection for Java in the fall of 1996. Soon after, joined by the Java Technology Group in Solaris Software, the project broadened to JVM performance in general. Today, ExactVM forms the core of the forthcoming JDK 1.2 Production Release for Solaris

In this talk we take a look under the hood, explaining key techniques to achieving high performance and scalability in a JVM:

• fast and responsive bytecode execution
• efficient and scalable synchronization
• a flexible and scalable memory system