Energy Consumption Analysis of Java Command-line Options

In 2018 Turing Award lecture, John L. Hennessy discusses software-centric opportunities to save Moore’s law. The software is a major consumer of energy in ICT, IoT, and edge systems, but even then the research to make it energy efficient remains fractional. Java is one of the most commonly used languages to develop software for these systems. Java has various command-line options that an application user can use for JVM tuning to enhance the performance of an application. However, there is no study about how these Java command-line options impact the energy consumption of an application. In this work, we explore the impact of various Java command-line options on SPECjvm2008 benchmarks in terms of energy consumption and execution time using different JDKs. Our key findings are: 1) Oracle JDK is more energy efficient than Open JDK, 2) Xint command-line option is the least energy efficient, 3) UseG1GC command-line option is the most energy efficient, and 4) Active energy and execution time show a high correlation.