A Practical Approach for Improving Startup Latency in Java Applications

In emerging application domains, such as thin client computing and hypertext systems with embedded objects (e.g. the World Wide Web), the process of downloading application code is in the critical path of users. We observe that in these domains, compliance with existing standards and minimizing the impact on the clients is crucial. We argue that the fundamental problem for mobile code is that the units of code distribution in networked object systems, such as Java, are not suited for efficient utilization of network bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a separate optimization step, between compilation and loading, whereby application code is restructured to more effectively use the available network bandwidth for program download. We have designed and implemented such an optimization step as a binary rewriting service for Java applets and applications. Our implementation does not require any modifications to existing Java virtual machines, compilers or clients. We have found that restructuring of Java applications can improve program startup times by up to 30%.

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