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We very occasionally focus the newsletter on a single article because we feel that one article is of sufficient importance to the Java performance community that we should emphasize its importance. This month we do that for Sun's "JSE 5.0 Trouble-Shooting and Diagnostic Guide". It is a big document, but worth a browse - the huge list of tips we extracted should indicate its worth.

But as we read through the article, one thing really annoyed us. (Don't let that detract you from the usefulness of the article, but we couldn't help ranting a bit about this). Early on in the article we saw this statement:

"In general, most -XX options are unsupported, undocumented, and were originally included for the purposes of testing components of the HotSpot Virtual Machine during its development. However many -XX options are important for performance tuning and diagnostic purposes, and are therefore described in this chapter."

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This is hardly news, we all know about the -XX tuning parameters and invariably use some of them as we tune our Java runtimes. Most systems we have tuned have some components that have gone into production with -XX parameters in use. But this is now version 5 and that's what annoys us! Sun is fully aware that your average production JVM needs a few -XX paramaters to run with optimal performance (sometimes even to run with acceptable performance).

So it is about time Sun differentiated between the hundreds of -XX options that are really for Sun engineering support; and those that are somewhat much more likely to be used by their Java customers in their deployed systems.

Read on for our news, that selected article and its extracted tips, and for Kirks roundup on Thread.sleep, lakhs and crores, and other matters.

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• CA Pays $375M For Wily App Management
• Is Borland's Optimizeit team gone?
• Amex goes Java, Sun ES now supports > 1 million users worldwide
• Gartner's Magic Quadrant for J2EE Application Server Management, 2005: Wily (now CA), IBM, Veritas, Mercury and Quest
• Symantec releases i3 7.5

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Hadoop (formerly Nutch MapReduce) distributed computing platform includes the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS) and an implementation of MapReduce.
• Java Interactive Profiler

Articles

• JSE 5.0 Trouble-Shooting and Diagnostic Guide (Author Sun/Sun)

Jack Shirazi

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