Experience from teaching performance analysis of object-oriented systems

This paper reports our experience from teaching "Performance Analysis of Object-Oriented Systems" which was offered for the first time in the spring of 2004. The class was designed for juniors/seniors and graduate students majoring in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. The main focus of this course is on the implementations of class loading, Just-In-Time compiler, threading, and garbage collection in virtual machines supporting Object-Oriented languages such as Java and C#. We adopted Microsoft Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI) as the main experimental platform and the "Shared Source CLI Essentials" as one of the main accompanying textbooks. We find that the combination of SSCLI and the book provides a very effective means to deliver the course contents. In this paper, a complete documentation of the course design, the evaluation of students' work, and the instructor's reflection is presented