[kaffe] how i'm hoping to use kaffe

[Jon Nall]

i'm hoping the nice folks on this mailing list can help me. i am working 
on a project that needs a discrete event simulator. conceptually, we 
will have lots of very lightweight threads, each of which will run until 
it determines it should give up control to another thread. due to the 
number and "lightness" of these threads, a JVM implementing solely 
native threads (e.g. Sun or IBM's offerings) just doesn't cut it 
performance-wise (this app will be running primarily on linux). luckily 
kaffe supports green threads.

i'm not sure why sun doesn't support green threads pst JDK-1.3, but they 
don't. i've tried a number of solutions with sun's JDK-1.4.2, including 
instrumenting the bytecode to implement continuations. then i found 
kaffe with its optional green thread implementation. i have a 
microbenchmark that spawns 25 or so threads, and each one runs for 50k 
iterations, updating some shared data structure. on this benchmark, 
kaffe's performance was remarkable. my hopes were high.

however, once i tried to run my full event simulator using kaffe, the 
performance went down the tubes. i have not been able to ascertain why 
exactly. the current implementation has all of the synchronization 
blocks one would need for a non-green thread implementation to avoid 
races. it also heavily uses a hashmap.

i'm writing in hopes that someone might have some insight as to what's 
going on, what to look for, or just how to find where the bottlenecks 
are. i don't mind reading code/docs. i just need a nudge or some 
insight, like i said.

also, are there any gui's for viewing kaffe's gprof output?

thanks for any help,
nall.