WebSphere ND 7.0 ships, cool feature: 64 bit pointer compression

WebSphere ND 7.0 shipped this month and one of the features I've been waiting on is the new IBM Java 6 virtual machine. The 64 bit version has a very cool feature called pointer compression. A lot of customers ask about 64 bit support, I get this a lot with WebSphere Extreme Scale (ObjectGrid). The trouble with 64 bit JVMs is that the pointers are all 64 bit and typically customers report their physical memory usage doubling for the same JVM heap size when they go 64 bit. This means that it can take 4Gb of memory to store a 2 GB 64 bit heap which is almost double what it took on 32 bit JVMs. This is the case (AFAIK) with competing JVMs etc today.

The new IBM Java 6 JVM has pointer compression which finally helps with this issue. This allows customers running on the IBM JVM to only use 2Gb of RAM with a 2Gb heap on 64 bit. This can be a massive benefit for ObjectGrid customers and for customers consolidating multiple servers on to boxes. 64 bit applications can now be consolidated with paying a huge memory overhead.

This feature should give platforms with the IBM JVM a pretty major cost advantage and performance advantage over running on platforms without an IBM JVM available.

You can download a trial version from here.

Comments

[Dick Davies]

Nice to know, but not sure it's that much of a competitive advantage. Most other JVMs (Suns, BEA) have a similar options.

[Mario]

Hi, i'm a very "junior" wesphre system administrator. I need to manage some different container with the same commands: so i thiught: "SIMPLE! There is WSADMIN"

BUT

it doesn't connect to any server (z/OS enviorment) nor SOAP nor RMI...

THEN

I read something about wscp and XMLConfig, but i'm running websphere 5.1 and higher.

SO

how could install this tools or what i can try to fix wsadmin on websphere 5.1.? on z/OS??

it would great if we can share our knowledge.

regards
alaspitz{A.T}gmail

[Tom]

> The trouble with 64 bit JVMs is that the pointers are all 64 bit and typically customers report their physical memory usage doubling for the same JVM heap size when they go 64 bit.

Are you kidding or what? Or you believe that heap is fully occupied by pointers?