Benchmarking

[Ernesto Pye]

I'm starting a new project pretty soon, and it's about comparing performance between a Windows and a Linux box. I have a few ideas as to what I could compare:
- File handling
- Memory
- Graphics
- Implementation of common algorithms (Sorting, encrypting, etc)
I'm not exactly sure as to what I could to compare these (code-wise). Doing the process repetitively and using currentTimeMillis(), taking time, etc, would be the basic idea...
Does anybody have any sample code I could take a look at to get me started in benchmarking?
Thanks in advance..
FYI: I'm currently dual booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 1, Java's installed and ready to go in both of them. Graphics drivers are updated in both, as well. I have yet to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel, but I'll be doing that over the weekend.

[Ilja Preuss]

What are you doing this for? What kind of performance are you interested in and why?

[Ernesto Pye]

This is for my IB extended essay assignment..
Uh, basically I wanted help on stuff I'd need to _measure_ or benchmark performance in those areas? (File handling, Memory, graphics..)
I just want someone to point me in the right direction, for example, what properties of file handling performance I should benchmark (cached, uncached, can this even be done in Java?).. So if anybody has had any benchmarking experience with files, memory, etc, I'd really appreciate it if you could perhaps give me some pointers or some sites I could look at..
Thanks for any help..

[Valeri Kireitchik]

Hi,
we have developed a benchmark to test CPU+RAM performance of the server. It creates a lot of threads and uses mem intensively. It produces numeric result thus you can compare different computers/OSs.
If you are interesed e-mail me on [e-mail] and I will send you source code.

[steve souza]

JAMon (Java Application Monitoring) is available at http://www.jamonapi.com and does what you asking for and more. It is based on System.currentTimeMillis(), but squeezes every bit of stats you can out of that method (i.e. It aggregates the data and tracks hits, avg, min, max, std dev and more).