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A while back Kirk mentioned to me that it had been at least two years since he had needed to use a profiler for CPU profiling a Java app. Memory profiling, thread contention profiling, JDBC profiling, OS level monitoring of resources - these are all things that he still needs to do for customers. But not CPU profiling.

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And looking back at my work for the last few years, I agreed I see nearly the same thing. Requests coming to me for help in resolving issues are rarely related to CPU profiling. In the few cases in the last few years where I have seen CPU profiling needed, developers fired up one of the common profilers, identified the issues and fixed them in hours.

Slow Java bytecode just doesn't seem to be a problem any more, even for naive code implementations. At worst, where there are problems, these are quickly identified and fixed. The real performance issues seem all to be over in the memory, network I/O and thread contention spaces. And sadly, these are much harder to tune. So despite my CPU profiling skills becoming slowly redundant, I won't be stopping tuning any time soon.

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Now on with the newsletter. We have our usual lists of Java performance tools, news, and articles. At fasterj, we have a new cartoon, "Dumping heap on an out of memory error", Javva is back from holiday and having a rant about his taxing situation and, as usual, we have extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• BTrace, a new tool for dynamically tracing a running Java application using a AOP-style approach.
• never do I/O in a finalizer
• tuning options when you don't have the source
• Faster TreeMap from Apache in 1.6+
• VisualVM (another announcement of its launch, but I decided it's worth re-mentioning)

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Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Performance Analysis Tool for Java, non-invasive tool to analyse windows system resources and Java threads
• pureQuery high-performance Java data access platform focused on simplifying the tasks of developing and managing applications that access data
• ConTest: ConcurrentTesting - Advanced Testing for Multi-Threaded Applications
• Timing Framework, a library for making Java animation and timing-based control easier

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Articles

• Testing for performance, part 1: Assess the problem space (Michael Kelly/TechTarget)
• Testing for performance, part 2: Build out the test assets (Michael Kelly/TechTarget)
• Testing for performance, part 3: Provide information (Michael Kelly/TechTarget)
• Efficient data transfer through zero copy (Sathish K. Palaniappan Pramod B. Nagaraja/IBM)
• The Law of the Uneaten Spinach (Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz/)
• Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm (Kirk J. Krauss/DrDobbs)
• Using P6Spy and the GlassFish Connection Pool to Trace Database Operations (Jagadish Ramu/Sun)

Jack Shirazi

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