Multithreaded Programming with JAVA™ Technology

Appendix C. Timings

Timings

The choice of which synchronization variable to use depends partially on its execution speed. This is particularly applicable when choosing between using a mutex lock and a readers/writer lock. The design of programs calling Java functions in tight loops will also depend upon these numbers for optimizations. For the most part, however, all of these times are short enough that they may be ignored.

Because of the dependence of these tests upon several unusual instructions (ldstub and stbar on SPARC), machines with different cache or bus designs will exhibit nonuniform scaling (meaning that a context switch may be twice as fast on a 20-MHz processor as it is on a 10-MHz processor, but locking a mutex might take the same ...