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Back to newsletter 022 contents | All Javva's articles
Spec has taken over ECperf and now has the SPECjAppServer2001 benchmark. Well good. A benchmarking organization is presumably more experienced at benchmarks, which should make the vendors run the benchmark with less cheating, whoops, I mean more rigorously, than previously. But the most interesting point was made by Ramesh I (possibly of Pramati) in this discussion at the server side (sorry Kirk, I'm encroaching on your roundup).
Ramesh pointed out that if a vendor has made at least one submission to the ECperf/SPECjAppServer2001 benchmark, then that submission gives you the optimal configuration and tuning setup for the vendor's application server. Think about it for a moment. How would you like the company that supplies your application server to send in their very best experts to configure and tune your application, for free. Well they have for the ECperf application, which surely has many components in common with a lot of J2EE applications. So look at their benchmark submissions, and find out what they configured and what they tuned.
Alternatively, make your application an industry standard benchmark, and they'll also tune your application for free.
This Wired article on How Al-qaida site was hijacked is old news now. But it struck me that if things had gone a little differently, it could have cost someone their life, or saved lives. In fact it may have even, the way it happened. And the core thing is that seconds mattered. On the Internet, seconds can make the difference between life and death, with something as mundane as registering a domain name.
I give it a couple of years before we get a thriller about a domain name mixup which allows some innocent person to save the world after the requisite subterfuge and car chases.
August 6. Moving departments takes so much time. There's moving the desk contents (not at all for me), getting used to the new surroundings (nope), meeting all your new colleagues (hi QA guys), etc, etc, etc. What a great excuse to do nothing for weeks. Maybe this isn't so bad. On the other hand, its kind of boring.
August 13. Planning how to integrate performance test reporting to the QA system. I've got some real fancy plans and it'll take a bit of work. First, we split performance testing and performance tuning into two separate issues. HasntGotAClue decided this, and to be honest it makes perfect sense. Previously I did the whole thing and reported on it all in one go, but in fact they are two separate tasks, needing separate skills. HasntGotAClue wants to do it for a specific reason. The testing is under his remit, but he is going to specify the tuning as development. This lets him bill me to Frezian's account for that part of the work.
August 14. Went further and split it into three. Performance testing, performance analysis, and performance tuning. After thinking about the two-way split, I realized that there are three tasks, so I split it out that way.
August 15. Even further. Now I've added specifications to the list. I was reading through some of the performance management stuff on JPT (this) site, and realized that we have five tasks:
August 20. I've been doing a management report on the whole system, the requirements for integerating with the QA reporting system, a timeframe of one month, to be mostly completed by end September. I've been doing the whole thing in close conjunction with Weevil, who has okayed every step. I've also been reporting regularly to HasntGotAClue, so that he is fully up to date. It's come through as one man month full time, dedicated to the setup I've defined. Weevil seemed quite happy to rubber stamp the whole thing. He seemed to think it was a lot of work for no reason, and also with too aggressive deadlines. Of course he didn't say that to me or HasntGotAClue since he doesn't have to do the work, but BigMouth is as reliable as ever.
August 22. Weevil's just thrown a complete fit. He's only just found out that I'm scheduled to go on holiday for three weeks from tomorrow. Of course that wouldn't bother him, if it wasn't that HasntGotAClue has assigned the complete reporting integration scheme to him, since he was the only one who was involved closely enough to take over. He's been screaming that it's way too much work but HasntGotAClue simply pointed out that he okayed the whole scheme, and he'd had weeks to query the schedule. Which was a bit of an exaggeration, but I didn't point that out, and I don't think even Weevil even heard. I think Weevil could do with a holiday. Personally, I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing holiday, after which I'll be back to slowly integrate myself into the work that's been done in my absence.
BCNU
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