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Performance support in the JVM needs three aspects to it:

1. Monitoring the runtime system to be able to analyze where the performance bottlenecks are, with the monitoring having a low overhead
2. High performance optimizations applied by the sytem where known optimizations can be applied
3. Automatic dynamic adjusting of runtime configuration parameters to improve performance with minimal manual tuning

It's fair to say that until now "1" was not really available for JVMs; "2" is beginning to mature, with HotSpot technology capable of applying many standard optimizations as well as some proprietary OO optimizations; and "3" actually began to become available with the garbage collection algorithms becoming flexible, varied, and capable of some automatic dynamic adjustments to optimize the runtime performance.

Now the early release version of 1.5 is available, and it looks like the JVM is beginning to mature. After all, any system that doesn't have low overhead monitoring capabilities on it's basic statistics is really not a mature system; and finally 1.5 sees a version of low overhead monitoring being added to the JVM. So with the compiler maturing, and the runtime beginning to mature, the Java runtime as a whole is progressing well.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

In the newsletter we list our usual raft of articles, news, and more. In addition, we have all our usual sections. Kirk's roundup covers object relational mapping tools, the performance difference in iterators and enumerations, different GC algorithms, and more; Our interview is with Lax Sakalkale, Senior Product Manager of the Optimizeit performance solutions at Borland Software Corporation; And our question of the month asks about what to do when you have the option of multiple features and you want to choose the optimal performing one.

Javva The Hutt continues his diary and finds he's become a news star; We have a new cartoon, an article about Fast Random Access, and, of course over 70 new performance tips extracted in concise form.

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Sun report shows Java "Beats .NET for Processing XML"
• Performance improvements for 1.5 means you'd better start tuning again from the no-options default.
• New JVM profiling API (JVMTI) and other monitoring facilities including a low memory detector.
• Discussion about Hibernate performance

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Recent Articles

• Fast random access (Jack Shirazi/JavaPerformanceTuning.com)
• Exceptions best practice (Jack Shirazi Kirk Pepperdine/IBM)
• Using a Request Filter to Limit the Load on Web Applications (Kevin Chipalowsky, Ivelin Ivanov/cocoonhive.org)
• How to Diagnose a Performance Problem in a J2EE System (John Bley/WeblogicDJ)
• Servlet API and NIO (Taylor Cowan/IBM)
• NIO (Vish Krishnan/JDJ)
• HTTP Session Garbage Collector (Abhinasha Karana/JDJ)
• J2ME Game Optimization Secrets (Mike Shivas/MicroJava)
• Translets (Raghu Donepudi/devX)

Jack Shirazi

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