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My trawl time is down quite a lot. I trawl through a bunch of sites to find all the articles, news items, tools, blogs, etc., that interest me, the most interesting subset of which I list in the monthly newsletter. It is common for the blogs to have long gaps between posts, some bloggers are consistent but most are quite intermittent with blasts of several posts close together and long gaps. But the gaps are now longer, the blasts fewer and smaller. And suddenly I'm seeing sites going missing - something I haven't seen since 2002. That's complete websites disappearing, not just pages or blogs. It's pretty unusual for a site to disappear from my trawl - bear in mind I'm only trawling sites that for the most part produce useful Java performance information, such sites are already above average quality and tend to be long-lived sites.

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It's back to 2002. Those of you who remember 2002 will remember a rash of sites disappearing after all that venture capital funding dried up and you didn't get money just for adding a lower-case 'e' to your idea. That was the last time I saw sites disappearing from my trawl. On the positive side, though, this is almost certainly a lagging indicator, sites come up for renewal once a year so a site disappearing means that it's probably already been a while since the owner gave up on the site. If the comparison is consistent, things are due to start picking up again in the first half of next year, after moving sort of sideways until then. Whether that's good news or not probably depends on where you are now, but I wish you all the best whatever your situation.

Now on with this month's newsletter. Javva The Hutt is back from hols, telling us about his nephew's internship; there's a new cartoon at fasterj showing a profiler in action; and we have all our other usual Java performance tools, news, articles, and, of course, we have extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Terracotta 3.0 improves throughput of Java-based applications three-fold while reducing database loads by 60 percent compared to the previous version (notes competitors are GigaSpaces, GemStone Systems, ScaleOut Software, Tangosol/Oracle Coherence).
• DateFormat is not thread safe.
• beet recently open-sourced library for logging performance metrics in a Spring-based Java application
• New Command-Line Options in VisualVM 1.1

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Embarcadero Technologies J Optimizer 2009
• IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java
• J2EE Applications Load Testing and server monitoring tool
• Virtual Machinery's JHawk product generates metrics from Java code that target performance aspects (as well as others)

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Articles

• Performance tuning is about applying localized optimizations (Kirk Pepperdine/pepperdine)
• An Introduction to Concurrent Java Programming (Stephen B. Morris/informIt)
• Challenges of Monitoring, Tracing and Profiling your Applications running in "The Cloud" (Andreas Grabner/dynaTrace)
• Performance Analysis in 30 Minutes (Madhu Konda/Sun)
• Java Performance Tuning resources (Madhu Konda/Sun)
• High-Performance Oracle JDBC Programming (Yuli Vasiliev/Oracle)
• Anatomy of a Java Finalizer (Jinwoo Hwang/JDJ)

Jack Shirazi

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