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This month I've included some articles on performance aspects of data structures in C#. Wait, I've not gone mad, nor am I about to start a parallel C# performance site. The reality is that the information in these articles are completely applicable in Java, and any well written article with performance information is of interest to me.

Otherwise, the performance news continues to show just how hot Java performance tools are this year. We at JavaPerformanceTuning.com are doing our bit to ensure that you know just what tools are available and how to use them, with our Performance Tools & Methodology course, our intensive hands-on one day course that covers a host of Java performance tools.

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In the newsletter we list our usual raft of articles, news, and more. We have most of our usual sections: Kirk's roundup covers memory tuning, caching, session state, obscure flags, 1.5 enhanced loop and more; our question of the month asks why long primary keys are bad for performance; Javva The Hutt continues his diary and writes a memory monitor with some interesting side effects; we have a new cartoon, and many new performance tips extracted in concise form.

Additionally, we have a special article on the Commando Pattern, with a working example showing how it can improve the performance of any application. One not to be missed!

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Wiley's survey indicates faulty database connections are an important factor in application downtime
• CTO view of managing performance across the enterprise.
• The resulting discussion on the Wiley finding suggests the connection pool should handle connection robustness and maintenance. Features should include: efficient connection checking, maximum connection live time, maximum connection busy time, automatic eviction of connections that raised an exception, efficient prepared statement caching, fine tuning of the pool size, automatic grow/shrink according to load, dynamic reconfiguration, protection against 'burst allocation'.
• 1.5 will include a new Network Transfer Format for Java Archives, including methods to read packed jar files in javax.pack. The Pack200 compressed rt.jar to 12% of uncompressed size.
• Example of using Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner
• Test comparing XML processing in Java vs. .NET, by Sun's "XML Performance Team"
• Finalizers appear to be dramatically bad for performance.
• The resulting discussion from the finalizer performance test.
• Despite the discussion title, this discussion has some valuable points about accelerating Java drawing performance. Just try to avoid the noise.
• Performance monitoring and management is hot, and there are lot's of solutions available.
• Doh! Rather obvious result from Compuware study that most performance problems are discovered when users report them.
• Teamstudio Java Suite version 5 includes new thread profiler as well as new versions of memory and performance profilers
• Veritas claims can isolate J2EE performance problems in minutes

Tools

• Spin is a transparent threading solution for non-freezing Swing applications.
• Foxtrot API to use threads with the Swing.
• UICompiler rapid prototyping tool for GUI building, includes action policies for threading Swing actions
• DevStream J2EE monitor

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Recent Articles

• The Commando Pattern (Jack Shirazi/JavaPerformanceTuning.com)
• Why Capacity Planning Is Seldom Done Well (Rich Schiesser/informIT)
• Webserver + Application server configuration (Akash Kava/developer.com)
• Client-Side Cache Control Servlet Filter (Jayson Falkner/OnJava)
• Data Structures (Scott Mitchell/Microsoft)
• The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable (Scott Mitchel/Microsoft)
• Binary Trees and BSTs (Scott Mitchell/Microsoft)
• Better Binary Search Tree (Scott Mitchell/Microsoft)
• Concurrent Programming (Cameron Hughes & Tracey Hughes/Addison Wesley)
• Performance Forensics (Bob Sneed/Prentice Hall)

Jack Shirazi

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