If you open "Start" menu in 64-bit Windows platform you will notice interesting thing - there are two shortcuts for Internet Explorer: "Internet Explorer" and "Internet Explorer (64-bit)".
So, we have different IEs working in 32- and 64-bit modes at the same time on the same machine. Before now Image Uploader checked edition of Internet Explorer where it is opened, if it was 32-bit edition — Image Uploader ActiveX was instantiated, otherwise — it opened Image Uploader Java. This approach brings some inconveniences to end-users: they have to install 64-bit Java runtime in addition to 32-bit one which is installed everywhere. The upcoming release of Image Uploader 7 will have "native" support of 64-bit Internet Explorer; there will be special edition of Image Uploader ActiveX able to work in 64-bit mode.
At this moment we are preparing new Image Uploader for release and found interesting thing. Our standard set of tests includes speed checks, the idea is quite simple: since the "heaviest" part of Image Uploader in terms of speed is imaging operations, we have standard set of photos; automatic tests resize them down with different quality levels and checks time spent for these operations. Here are the results:
What conclusions can we carry out from this chart? First of all, Java is not bad in the case if you use Image Uploader to create thumbnails of small size. From the other hand, ActiveX edition is much better for large thumbnails (for example, if you are photo finishing company and you optimize photos client-side before uploading them). It was interesting to know that the same java code gives different results on 32- and 64-bit editions of Java runtime: 64-bit edition gives much better results. Also the same thing can be noticed for ActiveX version: new 64-bit Image Uploader ActiveX works faster in all test cases, performance increase is 5-30% on different tests.
New Image Uploader 7 update will be available in 2-3 weeks, me and our Image Uploader team hope you will like it :)