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Java 6 has been released just as we've finally moved our production systems to Java 5. And I see that a number of bugs fixed in Java 6 are being backported to the next Java 5 release - I'd love to say that this was because of my October newsletter, but in reality I'm sure that Sun planned to do this at some point - it's not really reasonable to expect all customers to leap to the Java 6 JVM anytime soon and so critical bugs needed to be backported.

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I have a suggestion for Sun. Alternate bug fix and feature releases. I know this would be painful, but I'd really like to see the next 1.5 release holding only bug fixes, and no new features at all. Mixing new features with bug fixes in the same release just makes it too easy for new bugs to get into the release - I was previously stuck on 1.4.1 in production for far too long because each time we tested a move to 1.4.2, we hit a different critical bug that had been introduced in patch releases. I'd rather not have the same thing happen again.

Now on to our newsletter. First off, oops, we had the wrong devX link in last month's newsletter, the "Real-Time Tracking and Tuning for Busy Tomcat Servers" article is at http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/32730 and not the one we linked to. Javva the Hutt continues to tell us all about what he was doing while he was away. (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.) And of course we have our other news, this months selected articles, tools, and our many new extracted performance tips.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Kirk demonstrates the effectiveness of using Terracotta Sessions to replicate HTTP sessions with a detailed benchmark.
• Terracotta open sources JVM clustering
• BEA releases Mission Control 2.0 - A management console for the JRockit JVM with a Runtime Analyzer and Memory Leak Detector.
• benchmark showing Java (JRockit JVM) scales nicely on multi-core processors.

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Mac OS X includes X-ray, a timeline-based performance visualization tool that gives you the ability to see CPU, disk I/O, memory usage, garbage collection, events, and more in the form of graphs tied to time.
• Auptyma Java Application Monitor (JAM) provides you with complete visibility into your high transaction systems at an overhead below 1 percent.
• Expedited Real-Time Threads, for improving predictability of high-frequency, hard, real-time Java applications.
• JChav is a way to see the change in performance of your web application over time, by running a benchmark test for each build you produce.

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Articles

• DRY Performance (Kirk Pepperdine/The Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Distributing synchronization across threads (Gregg Wonderly/Artima)
• StringBuffer.toString() doesn't share contents in 1.5 (David Weitzman/JavaRanch)
• Debugging PermGen OutOfMemoryError problems in windows (Rich Unger/java.net)
• Hyper-threaded Java (Randall Scarberry/)
• Multithreading, Java, & OSGi (Oliver Goldman/Dr Dobbs)

Jack Shirazi

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