Here - Agents Lab - University of Nottingham

steps of 10000 up to 100000 objects. The compactness was measured by countingthe number of bytes of the encoded content. If the encoded content was a string,it was converted to a byte representation using UTF-8 encoding (other encodingslike UTF-16 would have been possible but would have resulted in worse results).For the performance, the time between start and end of the encoding cycle wasmeasured, other tasks like encoder and object setup were not considered.In the following, we will present the results of both the performance and thecompactness features. While the test data is certainly artificial, we have tried tosupply what we think is a good cross-section of possible data cases.5.1 PerformanceIn order to avoid interference with lazy initialization procedures and the just-intimecompilation of the Java VM, all performance tests were run twice, with theresults of the first test run being discarded. This allowed the Java environment tocompile the code and the encoding framing to initialize constants during the firstpass so that the real performance figures could be obtained during the secondpass.Time (ms)2500020739200001788115806150001347711790933510000801655885000373521721077 1361 1692 2057 2377 2717 3196 360900 20000 40000 60000 80000 100000Number of ObjectsJade FIPA SL Jadex XML Java Serialization Jadex BinaryFig. 8. Results for the performance measurements, Jade FIPA SL encoding requiringa disproportionally long timeThe result of the tests can be seen in Figure 8. While all encoding timemeasurements seem to increase linearly with the number of objects, the FIPASL encoding provided by Jade appears to require an unusually long time. Asexpected, both Jadex Binary and the Java serialization mechanism provide substantiallybetter results; however, even Jadex XML which is not intended to be111