Just-in-time Compilation - Startup Delay and Optimizations

Startup Delay and Optimizations

JIT typically causes a slight delay in initial execution of an application, due to the time taken to load and compile the bytecode. Sometimes this delay is called "startup time delay". In general, the more optimization JIT performs, the better the code it will generate, but the initial delay will also increase. A JIT compiler therefore has to make a trade-off between the compilation time and the quality of the code it hopes to generate. However, it seems that much of the startup time is sometimes due to IO-bound operations rather than JIT compilation (for example, the rt.jar class data file for the Java Virtual Machine is 40 MB and the JVM must seek a lot of data in this contextually huge file).

One possible optimization, used by Sun's HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, is to combine interpretation and JIT compilation. The application code is initially interpreted, but the JVM monitors which sequences of bytecode are frequently executed and translates them to machine code for direct execution on the hardware. For bytecode which is executed only a few times, this saves the compilation time and reduces the initial latency; for frequently executed bytecode, JIT compilation is used to run at high speed, after an initial phase of slow interpretation. Additionally, since a program spends most time executing a minority of its code, the reduced compilation time is significant. Finally, during the initial code interpretation, execution statistics can be collected before compilation, which helps to perform better optimization.

The correct tradeoff can vary due to circumstances. For example, Sun's Java Virtual Machine has two major modes—client and server. In client mode, minimal compilation and optimization is performed, to reduce startup time. In server mode, extensive compilation and optimization is performed, to maximize performance once the application is running by sacrificing startup time. Other Java just-in-time compilers have used a runtime measurement of the number of times a method has executed combined with the bytecode size of a method as a heuristic to decide when to compile. Still another uses the number of times executed combined with the detection of loops. In general, it is much harder to accurately predict which methods to optimize in short-running applications than in long-running ones.

Native Image Generator (Ngen) by Microsoft is another approach at reducing the initial delay. Ngen pre-compiles (or "pre-jits") bytecode in a Common Intermediate Language image into machine native code. As a result, no runtime compilation is needed. .NET framework 2.0 shipped with Visual Studio 2005 runs Ngen on all of the Microsoft library DLLs right after the installation. Pre-jitting provides a way to improve the startup time. However, the quality of code it generates might not be as good as the one that is jitted, for the same reasons why code compiled statically, without profile-guided optimization, cannot be as good as JIT compiled code in the extreme case: the lack of profiling data to drive, for instance, inline caching.

There also exist Java implementations that combine an AOT (ahead-of-time) compiler with either a JIT compiler (Excelsior JET) or interpreter (GNU Compiler for Java.)