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JavaPerformanceTuning.com has now been available for two years. Even when the site opened, we immediately provided the most comprehensive set of information related to Java performance available anywhere on the web. Then, we opened with over five hundred performance tips at the end of October 2000. Now we're coming up to the three thousand tips mark. Tips cover everything from specification to deployment, design to profiling, volatile to EJB, J2ME to J2EE, JNI, graphics, audio, and much, much more.

Apart from the tips we also provide the most comprehensive list of Java performance resources on the web. The number of people coming to the site has steadily increased month on month, and the rate of increase seems to be growing. Almost every query for performance information in Java discussion groups and on Usenet includes a reference to JavaPerformanceTuning.com. All of that and we give you the relevant Java performance news too.

This two year-old toddler, born after the excesses of the dot-bomb were unravelling, is growing fast and healthily. We hope to provide comprehensive Java performance information for many years to come. Happy Birthday JavaPerformanceTuning.com.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

This month we continue to find many articles discussing features available from the NIO library. There are also many articles covering various aspects of J2EE (JDBC, EJB, Scaling, Clustering, Sessions and Servlets), as well as articles on ThreadLocal, Swing, animation, profiling, optimizing and OS-level monitoring.

Martin Fowler's article "Yet Another Optimization Article" is worth singling out. Martin often comes up with real gem quotes, and this time is no exception. Here are a couple of those gems:

If you make an optimization and don?t measure to confirm the performance increase, all you know for certain is that you?ve made your code harder to read.

After upgrading your compiler or VM, the optimization you did six months ago could be your bottleneck today.

Lovely .sig material. Kirk and Javva are also here with their excellent contributions; we have news, new tips categories, and new tool reports. Welcome, dive in and enjoy.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

New Tips Categories

• JMS performance tips
• JDBC PreparedStatement tips

Tool Reports

• The J-Sprint profiler, a cheap but fully featured Java profiler
• Steve Souza has updated his Java monitor (JAMon) to open source, and added servlet filters and more examples

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Joakim Dahlstedt, one of the originators of the JRockit JVM, discusses Java's performance advantages
• Alan Williamson discusses AWT and Swing performance shortcomings, and available alternatives
• Pramati posts SPECjAppServer2001 benchmarks
• Intel licenses Precise's Indepth J2EE monitor for Intel's VTune enterprise analyzer
• Isocra announces the release of Livestore, a transparent JDBC data cache
• JRockit JVM focuses on performance
• GemStone CMP Accelerator now works on JBoss
• GemStone GemFire real-time shared-memory cache version 1.0 released
• Altaworks talks about the need for intelligent performance analysis of J2EE systems

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Books

• Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning, by Jason Fink, Matthew Sherer, Kurt Wall

Tools

• Light-weight XML Encoding Library
• Isocra's Livestore, a transparent JDBC data cache
• HPjtune for analyzing garbage collection from the -verbosegc output

Recent Articles

• WebSphere performance tuning (Gennaro (Jerry) Cuomo Srini Rangaswamy/IBM)
• WebSphere HTTP session best practices (David Draeger/IBM)
• Optimization (Martin Fowler/martinfowler.com)
• Web server monitoring (Freshwater.com/Freshwater.com)
• Session persistence performance (Saurabh Dixit & Srikant Subramaniam/WeblogicDevelopersJournal)
• Sun community chat on NIO (Edward Ort/Sun)
• FileChannel objects background information (Richard Baldwin/Earthweb)
• Clustering J2EE (Ashok Banerjee, Ganesh Kondal & Sunil Kunisetty/JavaDevelopersJournal)
• JDBC drivers (Heinz Kabutz/DevX)
• Scaling J2EE (Mikhail Skorik/JavaDevelopersJournal)
• File Locking (John Zukowski/Sun)
• NIO (Ron Hitchens/OnJava)
• The Timer service (Richard Monson-Haefel/TheServerSide)
• JDBC tips (William Crawford/Oracle)
• Smooth animation/sprite engine requirements (Chris Preimesberger/DevX)
• Swing multi-threading (Guruprasad H.N./IBM)
• Row level locking (Nicholas Whitehead/ITtoolbox)
• Chapter 3, "Popular Unix Performance-Monitoring Tools for Linux" from "Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning" (Jason Fink/InformIT)

Older Articles

• Performance tuning with OptimizeIt (Jay Campan & Eric Muller/Borland)
• ThreadLocal (Brian Goetz/IBM)

Jack Shirazi

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