> > In the past I've found Map24 acts very differently on different machines. The
> > JVM can change things as well, e.g. the SUN JVM ran it mind-bogglinginly
> slowly
> > but the MSJVM ran it very fast (60fps almost).
> >
> > On some machines neither runs it fast.
> >
> > Related maybe?
> >
>
> Maybe.
> My experience is that nowadays the Sun JVM is almost always faster than the MSVM
> (especially the server VM), but I've come around a few cases in which the Sun
> JVM can perform really, really slow where the MSVM performs a lot faster in
> comparison. In those cases I tried to do some optimizations that are just *not
> done* in java, like (manually) inlining code or other micro optimizations I
> would do in C. The Sun JVM doesn't like that and can end up interpreting all
> code that should be jitted. You just have to depend that the Sun VM will do all
> those optimizations for you, and probably (hopefully) better than you could do
> yourself. If you write clean, well encapsulated code, the Sun JVM should perform
> very well in almost all cases, up to speeds comparable to C++. Which is kinda
> nice :-).
> But of course there are still other cases the Sun VM is not very good at (like
> fast trigonometry for example).
> In this case however, I doubt it. It's all just simple stuff going on and that
> should work reasonably well, even on old CPU's. I still think that it might be
> an openGL issue. Maybe for some reason it selects a software openGL mode for
> example. I've seen CottAGE (which is still the core of this emu) perform pretty
> well on a K6-III.
> Using the server VM might make a big difference though (lot's of array access
> and the default client VM doesn't do bounds check elimination).
>
> BTW, what's Map24?
>

Map24 is a great Java map web site. It has maps of Europe and is basically like a free up-to-date version of AutoRoute.

http://www.uk.map24.com/

Right now it's actually the only reason I install the JVM into my web browser, because I don't use Java for anything else. I find the Sun JVM too obtrusive (it runs a app in the background and puts an icon in the corner), so I install the MSJVM. Very annoying that MS removed it!

It used to be much simpler and quicker to access:
http://www.map24.co.uk/?nap24_sid=old
Recently they 'improved' it, but of course they actually made it worse... :-(

I think Map24 also powers the RAC route planner:
http://www.rac.co.uk/


It used to be if I was going to a place I would look at these sites in this order:
www.map24.co.uk
www.streetmap.co.uk
www.multimap.com

But now that map24 got worse I actually use streetmap first. Shame because it's a great little interface for zooming around the country maps.










You learn something old everyday...