Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2001/11/16/sun_shuns_ms_gutter_benchmark/

Sun shuns MS ‘gutter’ benchmark challenge

Not exactly a ceasefire

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Software, 16th November 2001 06:42 GMT

Sun's Pet Shop Boys - reponsible for the J2EE Pet Store application - say they won't be drawn into a benchmark dogfight with Microsoft.

Or even a catfight.

Microsoft has made much of a head-to-head which pits the showcase Sun code against a clone written for .NET. This purports to prove that .NET is leaner and faster than Java 2 Enterprise Edition.

It's already been widely rubbished, and today Larry Barron and Steve Wilson, who wrote the code and look after performance benkmarking for Sun, added their voices. They stress that Sun's J2EE Pet Store code is purely illustrational:

"It's specifically full of code to show you how to do things," they told us. "But you wouldn't use all of those in an application." It could easily be rewritten to take advantage of stored procedures, like Microsoft's Pet Store app, giving it matching performance.

"It's one of the worst benchmark documents we've ever seen. It runs on Solaris 2.6, which is several years old, and old hardware."

Would Sun release an optimized J2EE Pet Store, we wondered?

"We're not getting into the gutter," was the reply. "We don't believe Pet Store is a viable benchmark. We've already shown a JVM running on a machine with 72 CPUs. We're the first and only vendor to post SPEC-JBB2000 benchmarks over 200,000 and 300,000."

So there. ®

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