Sluggish MIDP emulation

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Tim Tyler - 27 Oct 2005 08:21 GMT

I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
do some MIDP development.

The MIDP emulator is like a slug. My phone runs MIDP apps *much*
faster than my desktop PC :-(

The issue makes testing my app into a painful, boring, and tedious
process.

Are there other MIDP 2.0 emulators out there that are a bit less sluggish?

Why is Sun's runtime so slow in the first place? Is this just a
"reference implementation" - which nobody is supposed to use to do
any real work - or what?

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Roedy Green - 27 Oct 2005 08:52 GMT

>Why is Sun's runtime so slow in the first place?

At what level does the simulation work? If there are simply dummy
native classes, I would expect it to zip along. If it actually
emulates the ARM chip, or whatever is in your phone, on a register
level, I can see why it would be a slug.

I remember reading that simulations of the IC layouts for Pentium
designs of a few seconds of code took days.

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Darryl L. Pierce - 27 Oct 2005 12:46 GMT

>>Why is Sun's runtime so slow in the first place?
>
> At what level does the simulation work? If there are simply dummy
> native classes, I would expect it to zip along. If it actually
> emulates the ARM chip, or whatever is in your phone, on a register
> level, I can see why it would be a slug.

The emulator doesn't emulate the CPU on a handset. It's just a KVM
instance that uses the OS stack for networking and emulates the UTI-9
keypad graphically.

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David N. Welton - 27 Oct 2005 11:19 GMT

> I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
> do some MIDP development.
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> "reference implementation" - which nobody is supposed to use to do
> any real work - or what?

I've found it pretty quick for Hecl development. There is a neat open
source emulator here:

http://www.barteo.net/microemulator/

but I don't know that it's any faster than what Sun puts out.

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Tim Tyler - 27 Oct 2005 22:23 GMT

David N. Welton <davidw@dedasys.com> wrote or quoted:

> > Are there other MIDP 2.0 emulators out there that are a bit less sluggish?
>
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> but I don't know that it's any faster than what Sun puts out.

That crashes with:

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javax.microedition.lcdui.game.GameCanvas

...on my application.

The documentation doesn't seem to mention the MIDP version supported.

I assume that this means that they have not supported MIDP 2.0.

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Darryl L. Pierce - 27 Oct 2005 12:45 GMT

> I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
> do some MIDP development.

What version? Is it the beta of 2.3 or the release of 2.2?

> The MIDP emulator is like a slug. My phone runs MIDP apps *much*
> faster than my desktop PC :-(

And what other applications are running on your desktop at the same
time? Are you running the profiler (which degrades performance
significantly) while running your application?

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Tim Tyler - 27 Oct 2005 22:09 GMT

Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

> > I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
> > do some MIDP development.
>
> What version? Is it the beta of 2.3 or the release of 2.2?

2.3.

Before that I was on 2.0 - which was just as slow.

> > The MIDP emulator is like a slug. My phone runs MIDP apps *much*
> > faster than my desktop PC :-(
>
> And what other applications are running on your desktop at the same
> time?

A number - but the task manager seems to think that between them
they only take up about 6% of my total CPU power.

Before you go any further with this, I have 512Mb of memory most of which
is unused - and applications and applets run at a reasonable rate of
knots.

It's the MIDP emulator which behaves like a slug - not the rest of my
machine.

> Are you running the profiler (which degrades performance
> significantly) while running your application?

No: I run like this:

Java/WTK23/bin/emulator -Xdevice:QwertyDevice -classpath
preverified;resources -Xdescriptor:<my_jad_file.jad>

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Darryl L. Pierce - 28 Oct 2005 11:59 GMT

>>>I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
>>>do some MIDP development.
>>
>>What version? Is it the beta of 2.3 or the release of 2.2?
>
> 2.3.

That's still beta, is it not?

>>>The MIDP emulator is like a slug. My phone runs MIDP apps *much*
>>>faster than my desktop PC :-(
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
> It's the MIDP emulator which behaves like a slug - not the rest of my
> machine.

It's being affected by your total environment. If you have too many
things running, then it's not surprising that something's slowed down.

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Tim Tyler - 28 Oct 2005 21:00 GMT

Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

> >>>I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
> >>>do some MIDP development.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> That's still beta, is it not?

It is.

As a beta tester, I think Sun should improve their app's performance.

> >>>The MIDP emulator is like a slug. My phone runs MIDP apps *much*
> >>>faster than my desktop PC :-(
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> It's being affected by your total environment. If you have too many
> things running, then it's not surprising that something's slowed down.

<fx: sighs>

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Darryl L. Pierce - 05 Nov 2005 14:05 GMT

>>>>>I've been using the latest version of Sun's Wireless Java toolkit to
>>>>>do some MIDP development.
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
>
> As a beta tester, I think Sun should improve their app's performance.

But as a beta tester you should also realize that a beta product isn't
being performance enhanced as much as it's having bugs worked out of it.
Slow performance isn't a bug.

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Sluggish MIDP emulation

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