Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

After working in Ubuntu 10.04 for a bit, I have one major gripe - OpenJDK/IcedTea. I have no idea whose decision it was to drop the official Sun JDK from the repositories (or if Oracle had a part to play in this), but OpenJDK is a pile of steamy dog-droppings.

Since upgrading (and being forced to switch to OpenJDK) it is glaringly obvious that OpenJDK is an absolute resource hog. Running one instance of Tomcat 6 consumed 1.4GB of RAM!!! From all my previous usages of Sun's JDK, I could see that JVM expand to around 600MB (which I thought was bad enough), but 1.4GB?!?! Add to that my NetBeans IDE (let's assume it conservatively uses only 700MB as I saw during my language benchmarks), and trying to develop a single WebApp results in 2.1GB of RAM. I obviously need a database on top of that - imagine I use DerbyDB for that (another 700MB from OpenJDK) and we're sitting at 2.8GB for a single WebApp.

Complete lunacy.

I do realise I can go and manually install Sun's JDK, but my intention here is to develop on a system which is as much vanilla as possible.

If you read any of my previous posts, you'll already know my issue with IcedTea for applet development - thankfully a forum poster recommended running FireFox for a command-console, which causes IceTea to print results to that console, so at least I can see what's failing.