Initialization Code Runtime Reduction Effort

I don't know, I agree that dynamic overclocking is theoretically a concern, but from what I can remember, skipped turns have been quirky since long before we all had huge multi-core machines with hyperthreading and dynamic overclocking.

Quirky like skipping more turns vs an opponent that uses a lot of CPU (but doesn't skip turns!), or skipping lots more turns in the first 50-100 ticks of a battle. Obviously you do some initialization in the first tick, but shouldn't the subsequent ticks be mostly unaffected by that? Seems like that was never the case and still isn't. I guess garbage collection being outside of the scope of Robocode's vision is the most likely culprit for all this. But it's pretty frustrating, in any case.

That's a good point I wasn't even thinking about. Looking at the log Wompi posted again, I can see that all setup was completed on turn 0, and turn 0 wasn't skipped.

Voidious -- did you check to see if XanderCat appeared to be skipping a lot of turns on your Ubuntu/OJDK machine?

I can try to improve the CPU performance of my wave surfing drive and guess factor guns, and that might help, but it doesn't really explain the huge number of skipped turns on the first round. In the meantime, if skipped turns is a problem on Voidious' machine, I suppose for now I could just modify my bullet shielding system to try to account for skipped turns.

Remembered a 3rd possible cause of skipped turns. The JVM executes all code in interpreted mode for a while until JIT compiler kicks in. And at least in Sun/Oracle JVMs, the default JIT mode, client or server, varies with OS.

If you want to play around with it, I went ahead and released XanderCat 12.3. It's basically the same as 12.2 but I fixed some CPU performance issues. The main drives and guns execute quite a bit faster now with much lower peaks. Maybe it will make a difference...maybe not.