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Sun announced laying off another 1,000 personnel. Does this matter to the Java world? Realistically, yes. Of course Java is much bigger than Sun, and would continue without them. But Sun still controls Java, still supports the core packages, and still sets the direction for Java despite the Java Community Process. For example, Java3D appears comatose, with the final two Sun Java3D developers having been sacked (see this month's news below). There will be other Java areas that are affected too.

The problem is, Sun doesn't make enough money from Java. Come on Sun, 3 million existing developers, more than half the enterprise projects under development, you should be able to come up with some way of making money out of that.

If you are one of our dozens of subscribers from IBM, there is a good chance you didn't get the emailed version of this newsletter. For some reason unknown to us, IBM rejects this newsletter, possibly as spam. I've tried to ask IBM postmasters about this, but get no response. If you can help us to help IBM subscribers get this newsletter, please email me.

In November, we will be providing Java Performance Tuning training in Hong Kong, at a customer site. If anyone else in Hong Kong would like to arrange any training or consulting while we are there, please contact us as soon as possible.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

We have all our usual sections, as well as the start of what I hope to be a new regular addition, a monthly article on some aspect of Java performance. This month Scot Mcphee writes about Timers and audio performance. This is only the second article I have ever seen on Java audio performance, and it is nice to be able to bring it to you. If anyone else out there has a contribution they would like to make to our new article section, I'd love to hear from you.

In our other sections, Kirk's roundup covers super computers, garbage collection in microbenchmarks, not threading EJBs, capacity planning, the variability of performance across systems, and more This month's interview is with Frank Cohen, the creator of the open source TestMaker webservices load tester. Our question of the month asks if turning off assertions is a bad practice.

Javva The Hutt has another installment of his diary, and tells us about what to expect in the 1.7 JVM (that'd be around 2007 or 2008) and, of course, we have many new performance tips extracted in concise form.

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Now well known comment from Yahoo SiteBuilder lead engineer in discussion thread about this Java Swing product.
• 1.4.2 performance whitepaper
• eBay's services-driven network architecture
• TMC Releases Performance Case Study Results
• Gavin King of Hibernate offers $100 to anyone who can make handcoded JDBC faster than Hibernate generated JDBC.
• Benchmark comparing PHP, ASP and Java servlet performance for database access.
• Borland announces availability of ServerTrace DataCenter 2.0 J2EE monitor.
• JDBC Rowset Implementations
• Interesting discussion about Java games, slight reference to performance: "I'd especially like to ... turn on incremental and concurrent collection and adjust heap size min/maxes [at run time], and I'd really like to be able to specify a millisecond-resolution throttle on concurrent collection activity and ask it to make an incremental collection at a specific point in time, during a SwapBuffers. This is pretty important. I do other things besides games with Java - I'm doing something for Abu Dhabi TV right now using the LWJGL; they need a caption-generation system. Unfortunately, as it's live TV I'm not allowed to skip a single frame ever. It's pretty scary having to worry about GC occurring. And it's very noticeable when it does."
• Listing JSRs of interest to the performance community (163, 174, 133, 166).
• J3D looks like it may be dead, or at least comatose: "The final two developers working on Java3D have been sacked by Sun ... At this point Java3D is effectively dead"
• Wily announces study on Java Performance, calls for participation
• flash demo showing JDBInsight in action analyzing db transactions

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

• JGoodies Animation framework enables you to produce time-based real-time animations in Java
• Various classes including SQL execution time monitor and a connection pool
• Optimizeit ServerTrace
• Fprofiler, bytecode injection profiler using BCEL.
• HeapWizard: Java Heap Analyzer for diagnosing memory leaks, for IBM JVM only
• jvmstat: Always on, low impact JVM performance monitoring for HotSpot JVMs
• JOCache Java open source object caching library.

Recent Articles

See also our backlogged list of articles which lists all those articles that are of interest to the Java performance community, including those we have not had a chance to extract the tips from.

• Timers and audio performance (Scot Mcphee/JavaPerformanceTuning.com)
• JMS Application Architectures (Roland Barcia/TheServerSide)
• Hyperthreading Java (Paul Bemowski/JavaDevelopersJournal)
• Fast math with JNI (Jeff S. Smith/JavaWorld)
• Referencing objects (Jack Shirazi Kirk Pepperdine/IBM)
• BufferedImage as Good as Butter (Chet Haase/java.net)
• BufferedImage as Good as Butter II (Chet Haase/java.net)
• Profiling the profilers (Laurence Vanhelsuw? /JavaWorld)
• Living with [Abstraction] Leaks (Craig Castelaz/java.net)
• Performance of Java Compilers (Haralambos Marmanis/JDJ)
• Optimizing the Client/Server Communication for Mobile Applications, Part 1 (Forum Nokia/Nokia)

Jack Shirazi

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