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There is a subset of Java developers that encounter performance issues, and a subset of those that encounter lots of performance issues, and yet a smaller subset that encounter lots of performance issues and write about them. Typically, those writers write about some particular aspect of the issues they've encountered, but on occasion we get a detailed overview or a nuts and bolts article which covers lots of areas. The extracted tips from these types of articles ends up numbering dozens rather than the five or six we normally see.

Recently we were lucky to have one of each type of these articles published. Eclipse.org published a page of performance bloopers which goes into the nitty gritty of performance issues that were encountered and fixed in the eclipse application. These are common issues that happen in many applications, you are well advised to read the article, or at least the tips we extracted. At the other end of the spectrum, TheServerSide published an excellent overview of performance testing by Kirk, and one of the three dozen tips we get from Kirk is our quote of the month:

"Benchmarks almost always produce surprising results and it is very difficult to create a proper schedule around surprises."

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Further to last month's announcement that Javva the Hutt will be back, we couldn't quite get copy in time for this month's newsletter, but we should definitely have his column from next month. Meanwhile, for those of you who don't know Javva, or want a reminder, we've added a page for you to access all his old columns here

Now read on for our other news, this months selected articles and tools, and of course our many new extracted performance tips which include those from the articles we discussed above. Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that our sponsor just below is giving away free copies of "Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization".

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• JXInsight APM solution 4.2.2 released, is updated with lots of new stuff, read the blurb somewhere from the link
• JIT compilation in SUn JVM, -Xbatch, synchronicity and on-stack replacement
• JVM JIT handling of locals and parameters, and stack frames
• Java vs c performance
• Java vs c# performance
• Kirk proposes the "Shot in the Dark" anti-pattern
• jconsole has no cost if you don't connect (even if the beans are enabled); connecting costs up to 5% on performance

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Profiler4j is an open-source CPU profiler for Java based on bytecode instrumentation
• JIP is a code profiling tool much like the hprof tool that ships with the JDK, but JIP is interactive, has no native code, and is low overhead
• jhat, the Java Heap Analysis Tool parses java heap dump files generated by jmap/jconsole/-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError/hprof

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Articles

• Understanding The User Experience (Kirk Pepperdine/TheServerSide
• To Thread or not to Thread (Jean-Francois Arcand/java.net
• Performance Bloopers (eclipse.org/eclipse.org
• High Performance GUIs (Christopher Butler/ClientJava
• Tuning Memory Allocation (Henrik St?hl/BEA
• The Shared Classes feature (Ben Corrie/IBM

Jack Shirazi

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