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Introduction

Through class loaders, the JavaJava is a trademark of Sun Microsystems. virtual machine (JVM) supports a flexible model for loading executable code and resources at runtime [8]. Network class loading is an important form of class loading, in which class files and resources are transferred to the client JVM over a network from a server.

Because networks are generally slower in bandwidth and latency than local disks, users can experience poor startup times and significant delays when running an application loaded from a network. It is therefore desirable to optimize the transfer of classes and resources over the network to minimize these delays. Specifically, we would like to find an approach that has the following properties:

In addition, we would like to make the approach practical for `real-world' deployment: This paper describes a technique called bundling that can approximate all of these properties under realistic network conditions.

The document is structured as follows. Section 1 reviews existing network class loading mechanisms. Section 2 describes bundling. Section 3 presents some experimental results comparing the effectiveness of bundling to existing network class loading mechanisms. Section 4 describes related work. Finally, section 5 summarizes the contributions of this paper and suggests possibilities for future work.



David Hovemeyer
Tue Feb 27 18:43:09 EST 2001