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I'm straying from talking about performance again, this month. But a colleague pointed me to Steve Yegge's Tour de Babel. Okay, it's not exactly a new article. But it was new to me. And I decided I wanted to mention it here because he says so much that I agreed with. Like you can't write a lot of code in C without it becoming unmanageable.

The comment about Smalltalkers waiting for Smalltalk to become the language of choice, as it inevitably had to become, only to see Java steal the ground out from under them, is so, so true! I remember teaching Smalltalk in the 90s, after I had already moved to Java for my own development & consulting work, and the mood amongst Smalltalkers was so mixed: elation at a "proper" VM based OO language becoming mainstream, consternation that it wasn't Smalltalk, confusion about whether or not to jump to Java. Like Steve says, referring to a Jamie Zawinski article, Java is the best language amongst all the other languages - but they all suck. Java is just the least worst. That was true in the 90s, and it is categorically still true now.

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And on the power of emacs. I've long shifted to other IDEs for my development work in Java. But every once in a while I fire up emacs for text editing, and think to myself "why aren't I using this all the time?" It's so much more powerful than any other environment I've used. Then I remember that every place I go to integrates some Java IDE (intellij, eclipse or netbeans) into their environment so comprehensively that you absolutely HAVE to use them, even if there is something else that might be better, and I remember why I seldom use emacs.

Well, that's enough of my rambling this month. Now on with this month's newsletter. We have our usual lists of Java performance tools, news, and articles. At fasterj, I detail Five Lessons That Life Holds For Performance Tuning, Javva tells us all about his first go at troubleshooting a release and, as usual, we have extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• The Four Dimensions of Application Performance Monitoring; application dependency mapping, component health monitoring, business process tracing, and end-user experience monitoring
• one way to remotely profile through the firewall
• Servlet 3.0 adds API for suspension and event based resumption of requests to allow asynchronous sending and receiving of data as well as handling delayed and non-blocking requests.
• full GC triggered if kill -3 sent and -XX:+PrintClassHistogram is set
• Space4J - simple database system for working with Java Collections in memory. Space4J provides better scalability for "real-time" web applications and systems that require performance.

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Garbage collection log visualization tool, developed by members of the Sun JVM GC group.
• Eclipse Memory Analyzer is a fast and feature-rich Java heap analyzer
• TDA - Thread Dump Analyzer for analyzing Thread Dumps and Heap Information generated by the JVM - parses the thread dumps and class histograms from a provided log file.
• Space4J is a simple database system that will let you work with Java Collections in memory.
• Performance Analysis Tool analyzes the Windows performance log and Java thread dumps and automatically detects Java threads that consume the majority of system resources

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Articles

• Five Lessons That Life Holds For Performance Tuning (Jack Shirazi/fasterj)
• Is your concurrent collector failing you? (Kirk Pepperdine/kodewerk)
• Maximizing Java Performance with Bespoke Programming (Adrian Marriott/JDJ)
• Why 0x61c88647? (Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz/The Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Automating Java Performance Tuning (Carl Brahms/Oracle)
• Are all stateful Web applications broken? (Brian Goetz/IBM)
• Monitoring performance in a WebSphere Portal environment (Jesse T. Bickmore Dharmesh Mistry Kevin Dzwonchyk Gourishankar Menon/IBM)

Jack Shirazi

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