What is the reasoning around having an operation length in seconds in SPECjvm2008?
In the java world it is very common to run short operations. A server does often act on requests that take milliseconds to perform, but there are most often many of these requests. Both the SPECjbb2005 and the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmarks are built on this concept. The operations in SPECjvm2008 are actually somewhat longer than those in the mentioned benchmarks, but then again shorter than other existing workloads. By running multiple operations next to each other and many of them for an extended period of time, several “side effects” occur, which are typical JVM specific problems (or VEE to be more correct). An Example of such problems is load on the memory system (including both allocation and garbage collector), which is key in Java performance and tested by continuous work. When running the benchmark operations over and over for 4 minutes the “side effects” that a JVM has to handle occur. For several of the benchmarks the SPECjvm2008 team tested increasing and decreasing the work
