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Looking at codecentric's performance survey (see the news section), I'm not surprised by any of the results, but that doesn't make them any less useful as a point of reference. Two things struck me as worth mentioning here. Firstly, they found that two-thirds of the survey participants do not use any Java monitoring tools and 40% don't use any Java profiling tools. I like to turn figures around, so that's 25% who do monitor applications, and 60% who do use a profiler.

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Well, I said that there were no surprises, but actually I am a bit surprised that as many as 60% use a profiler. But then I recall just how profilers are used by most sites I've seen - mainly for profiling the speed of the application, not much else - and that is consistent with the other thing worth mentioning from the survey: the performance problem areas. These were primarily from database access and memory leaks (and then, in decreasing importance, from distributed apps, concurrency, and garbage collection). Of course this shows more a lack of knowledge than a problem with Java - the two biggest issues listed, database access performance and memory leaks, are easily addressed with current tools and monitoring methodologies. I'd suggest anyone who is having those as an issue should attend a performance course.

If you are looking for performance training courses, you should look no further than our courses which Kirk has thoroughly revamped and is now offering through us and a number of partners - see our training page for details, we have sessions available in the US, Canada, and Europe and can do onsite courses anywhere in the world. Please contact us for further information - courses are available in September and on.

Now on with this month's newsletter. We have all our usual Java performance tools, news, and article links. Javva The Hutt tells us about his new plan; there's a new cartoon at fasterj avoiding remote calls; 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.

• Terracotta helps you scale in the cloud
• beet 1.4 beta 1 released - performance logging for Spring
• Performance survey. conducted by codecentric at the JAX conference in 2008
• Lucid announces LucidGaze for Lucene, a free monitoring capability for installations using the Java Lucene search library
• Article describing how to use perf4j to monitor your application

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Beet records user behavior and performance data for your Spring-based Java application
• Google commons ConcurrentMap builder, providing any combination of: soft or weak keys, soft or weak values, timed expiration, and on-demand computation of values
• LucidGaze for Lucene provides performance monitors and statistics-collectors, for Lucene including stats on: index utilization, distribution and throughput; Query efficiency; Mapping of tokenizers, token-streams and analyzers

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Articles

• Java Multithreaded Web Service Performance Tips (Rommel Garcia/codecrawler)
• A simple way to analyze thread contention problems in Java (Markus Kohler/SAP)
• Understanding how the JVM uses native memory on AIX (Andrew Hall/IBM)
• Understanding how the JVM uses native memory on Windows and Linux (Andrew Hall/IBM)
• Advanced performance tuning concepts (Sean Walberg/IBM)
• How Hotspot Decides to Clear SoftReferences (Jeremy Manson/jeremymanson)

Jack Shirazi

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