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Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

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Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#31

Post by kaba0 »

solarkraft wrote: post #25
fniephaus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work on the GraalVM team. The students "measured noticeable reductions in terms of memory footprint of up to 43%" [1] in some preliminary experiments. More from the accompanying blog post: "We also hope that the Minecraft community builds on our work and helps benchmark different configurations for native Minecraft servers in more detail and in larger settings." Please feel free to share any numbers on…

Why is this? I thought the JVM already did somewhat decent JIT compilation ... If I understand the article correctly, you're preempting all possibly unoptimized/expensive code paths (reflection) by attempting to literally execute all of them? While it's a cool experiment, isn't it a bit error-prone (besides being a lot of effort of course, but playing Minecraft on the side does sound pretty fun!)?

The JVM is likely to beat AOT compiled java code in almost all cases - but due to Graal having a closed-world assumption (e.g. no unknown class can be loaded, so a non-final class knows that it won’t be overridden allowing for better optimizations, limited reflection allows for storing less metadata on classes, etc) it does allow for significant memory reduction. Also, escape analysis is easier in an offline manner.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#32

Post by solarkraft »

gavinray wrote: post #22
notme1234 wrote: post #15

Is Graal VM a silver bullet? Ignoring startup times, will Graal VM out perform classic JVM (IBM/Oracle etc'). I guess the optimization of the classic JVM are hard to beat. Also, cross compile is not working with Graal VM (which makes it harder to deploy than a good old Jar file).

I use GraalVM as my standard non-native JDK (OpenJDK replacement) and I'd say the performance is somewhat better. There are a lot of non-biased benchmarks you can find online, most of them showing that Graal (both CE/EE, though particularly EE) are more performant than OpenJDK. You then also have the option to compile to native, or to embed/run code in other languages baked in. It's a no-lose scenario IMO.

Are there no downsides?

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#33

Post by fniephaus »

solarkraft wrote: post #25
fniephaus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work on the GraalVM team. The students "measured noticeable reductions in terms of memory footprint of up to 43%" [1] in some preliminary experiments. More from the accompanying blog post: "We also hope that the Minecraft community builds on our work and helps benchmark different configurations for native Minecraft servers in more detail and in larger settings." Please feel free to share any numbers on…

Why is this? I thought the JVM already did somewhat decent JIT compilation ... If I understand the article correctly, you're preempting all possibly unoptimized/expensive code paths (reflection) by attempting to literally execute all of them? While it's a cool experiment, isn't it a bit error-prone (besides being a lot of effort of course, but playing Minecraft on the side does sound pretty fun!)?

JIT compilation requires additional CPU and memory resources at run-time, which AOT compilation can avoid. This also means that for a native executable, the compilation work only needs to be done once at build-time and not per process.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#34

Post by kaba0 »

majidazimi wrote: post #10
Thaxll wrote: post #6

"As such, it is supposed to require fewer CPU and memory resources, provide better startup times, and be easier and cheaper to deploy." So we don't even know if it actually makes things faster? Startup are a none issue, CPU / memory is but you need proof for that. Graal does not support ZGC or Shenandoah so it's hard to say if the G1 version from Graal is up to speed.

>Startup are a none issue Yes it is. Developing any short term job -- that runs multiple seconds and goes away -- like lambda or k8s jobs with Java is meaningless for exactly this reason. The startup time is longer than the run time.

The JVM can start up in less than 0.1 seconds. Depending on the amount of classes being loaded it is not an issue even for lambda and k8s jobs.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#35

Post by metadat »

bzzzt wrote: post #28
notme1234 wrote: post #15

Is Graal VM a silver bullet? Ignoring startup times, will Graal VM out perform classic JVM (IBM/Oracle etc'). I guess the optimization of the classic JVM are hard to beat. Also, cross compile is not working with Graal VM (which makes it harder to deploy than a good old Jar file).

Startup times (especially for 'on demand' cloud workloads) are kind of the point of GraalVM. Effectively, it shifts optimisation to the compile phase. GraalVM build take much more time than classic Java. But they run a bit faster (on some workloads dramatically) and use less memory. It's no silver bullet for development, if you want fast turnaround after changing your code you want the classic JVM. GraalVM can help t…

I haven't noticed compile times to be any worse when using GraalVM to build Java projects.

Caveat: I also haven't been using Native Images yet, though. So I can't comment on if it'll be dramatically different for that build target.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#36

Post by kaba0 »

bzzzt wrote: post #28
notme1234 wrote: post #15

Is Graal VM a silver bullet? Ignoring startup times, will Graal VM out perform classic JVM (IBM/Oracle etc'). I guess the optimization of the classic JVM are hard to beat. Also, cross compile is not working with Graal VM (which makes it harder to deploy than a good old Jar file).

Startup times (especially for 'on demand' cloud workloads) are kind of the point of GraalVM. Effectively, it shifts optimisation to the compile phase. GraalVM build take much more time than classic Java. But they run a bit faster (on some workloads dramatically) and use less memory. It's no silver bullet for development, if you want fast turnaround after changing your code you want the classic JVM. GraalVM can help t…

> But they run a bit faster (on some workloads dramatically)

That’s not true. For the majority of applications the JIT compiler will be much faster (either Graal’s JIT compiler or Hotspot). Startup time, and memory reduction is true though for AOT.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#37

Post by metadat »

the-smug-one wrote: post #20
notme1234 wrote: post #15

Is Graal VM a silver bullet? Ignoring startup times, will Graal VM out perform classic JVM (IBM/Oracle etc'). I guess the optimization of the classic JVM are hard to beat. Also, cross compile is not working with Graal VM (which makes it harder to deploy than a good old Jar file).

On some micros Graal beats C2, on some others it doesn't. It's not a silver bullet. GraalVM is regular OpenJDK with the compiler switched out, AFAIK.

> GraalVM is regular OpenJDK with the compiler switched out, AFAIK.

Do you have a source for this? Or how do you know?

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#38

Post by LtdJorge »

sdwvit wrote: post #3
fsiefken wrote: post #2

Can the same trick be used with the java client? My son runs minetest on the raspberry pi 400 as minecraft is to slow. I'll do everything for a bit more fps.

Hit Shift + F3 to see a frame time breakdown, then you can determine if it is slow graphics or cpu. If it is CPU, maybe graal helps, but it's hard to tell upfront. Also check out some mods dedicated to improving performance like Sodium.

It's always CPU with Minecraft. 1 thread can't do much more.

Re: Native Minecraft servers with GraalVM Native Image

#39

Post by LtdJorge »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

No need to go for the client, it's working fine on my machine, nearly 60fps with a 12-core, 32gb + RTX2080TI with Iris, Sodium, Phosphor and Lithium .

Nearly 60, lol. Also, fps are not the real problem for the client. I had a modpack with 16GB assigned crashing due to OOM errors. Forge is awesome, but modding the hell out of MC requires extreme specs.
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