Thomas said:
To get a JRE to support -server mode the user will need to
download and install the JDK that matches his JRE and
copy the jre\bin\server\jvm.dll or everything under jre\bin
to the JRE.
Obviously that advice only applies to Windows - there is only one executable
on, say, Linux.
The alternative would be for the user to mung the registry
to get the relevant entry to point to the jre in the JDK.
Once the user has a JRE that supports -server mode
where the browser expects to find the JRE
the user can use the Java Control Panel to specify "-server"
as an applet runtime parameter.
You risk antagonising your users by expecting them
to go through all that hassle just for your applet.
The "-server" option to the JVM enables certain optimizations, the kind that
show up after a program has run for quite a while. It is counter to the
purpose of applets to have long-running applets. For long-running programs,
Java Web Start is really the better choice.
Because applets generally do not run for a long time, the optimizations of the
"-server" option are likely not to be realized. There are optimizations in
the "-client" mode, too, just less aggressive ones that can be applied sooner
in the execution lifetime. I wouldn't expect the "-server" mode to make a
noticeable difference to applet performance in most cases.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. The dictum for performance
optimization is measure first, tweak performance second, then measure the
difference, because /a priori/ optimization guesses are almost always wrong.
I presume that the OP is getting the information needed in order to perform
such measurement prior to releasing the option in the wild.
