Patent ID: 7568190

Claim:
A method of optimizing runtime performance of a program written in an interpreted programming language, said method comprising: loading, within a virtual machine having a Just In Time (JIT) compiler, the program and a file specifying frequency of execution data for at least one component of the program determined from at least one prior execution of the program; executing the program comprising: reading the file specifying the frequency of execution data; seeding a counter maintained by the virtual machine that specifies a number of times at least one component of the program has been executed in the current execution of the program with a value derived from the frequency of execution data that is greater than a number of times the at least one component has executed in the current execution of the program; and performing a JIT action upon the at least one component of the program according to a comparison of the seeded counter of the virtual machine and a threshold maintained by the virtual machine indicating a number of executions of a component required before the JIT action is performed upon the component, wherein the at least one component of the program is the subject of the JIT action in fewer executions than specified by the threshold in consequence of the seeding.