A small followup for the previous entry about exception handling performance.
After the discussion, Zoltan fixed most of the big slowdown issue and now running the pie-thon benchmark, mono is just 20% slower than CPython while running all the tests (it was 2x slower before). Great progress.
What propmted this entry, though, is an interesting result while profiling the eclipse startup running with ikvm: 30% of the time is spent in the garbage collector but about 16% of the time is spent doing exception handling. I haven't investigated if this is an implementation detail of ikvm or the way eclipse works on other JVMs, too. So it turns out that improving exception handling performance helps also eclipse startup times.