[abc] Cardinal suddenly showing strange performance results

Hello again.

I just tried to track down what was causing those peeks we saw in
yesterday's benchmark. I think I have found the reason, which was simply
that "gc after each measurement" was _not_ enabled (I got the
commandline arguments wrong).

However, when I try to reproduce yesterday's results today, J-LO seems
orders of magnitudes slower than yesterday! 100 iterations take multiple
minutes already at the beginningm where yesterday they took only about
one second! This does not depend on the fact if GC is enabled or
disabled.

And it becomes even stranger: When I run the very same code on my
laptop, it shows results in the same order of magnitude as yesterday's
results on cardinal - even despite the fact that on my laptop I show the
graphics, which should impose an additional overhead. On both machines I
am using a 1.5 JVM and 1.5 class library.

I have to admit that I have no sensible explanation for this. I mean, I
did get way faster results yesterday - you have seen the numbers. But
there seem to be no other expensive processes running on cardinal. Also
I have reset the vnc server. That did not help either.

So I am really puzzled. I just hope that it was just me doing something
wrong and not that it is a general problem with the benchmark. Pavel has
helped a lot on IRC with trying to find out what could cause this but in
the end we both went out of ideas. I really don't know what to do about
this.

Eric

--
Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group, McGill University
Montreal, Canada