Java RTS Real-Time Enables Financial Applications

tandard Java has some deficiencies that make it less than ideal in the real-time world (see Sidebar 1. What Is Real-Time?). For one, the garbage collector (an internal JVM thread that reclaims old objects to free space on the heap) can run at any time, for any length of time, thereby introducing latency and non-determinism to your application. However, the garbage collector (GC) is not the only culprit in a standard Java application. The just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which optimizes your Java code for the machine it's running on, can be invoked at any time, even for code that has previously been optimized (JIT-compiled).

Further, Java SE does not typically honor thread priorities as specified in your code. For instance, a thread that you create and specify to run at highest priority will likely not run at the highest priority in the system. Therefore, other application threads can preempt your Java application at any time, leading to further non-determinism. The Java Real-time System (Java RTS) from Sun is meant to resolve these issues.