Sluggish MIDP emulation

[Tim Tyler]

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?

 

[Roedy Green]

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.

 

[David N. Welton]

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?

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.

--
David N. Welton
- http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/

Linux, Open Source Consulting
- http://www.dedasys.com/

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

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?

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

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.

 

[Tim Tyler]

Tim Tyler wrote:

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.

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>

 

[Tim Tyler]

Tim Tyler wrote:

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.

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.

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

2.3.

That's still beta, is it not?

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.

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.

 

[Tim Tyler]

Tim Tyler wrote:

That's still beta, is it not?

It is.

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

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>

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

It is.

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.