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Kirk pointed me at 97_Things_Every_Programmer_Should_Know and I immediately thought to myself "what is the one piece of advice I would contribute"? It took me all of 10 seconds to realise the most important thing from my point of view (the performance tuner and troubleshooter point of view): build your application with low cost monitoring in mind.

It doesn't have to be complex monitoring, simple logging statements that are easily identifiable, filterable, parsable, don't have too much volume, and have no significant overhead, works well. I'm put in mind of the JVM GC logging. It's pretty low tech, just prints lines to output, not too much overhead, and you can only really change the amount or level of logging at startup. But even so, it's low cost enough to be able to run in production (nowadays); and sufficient to be able to identify whether you have a GC problem, the likely type of problem, where to look next, and what parameters to tweak. Of course it could be much better, but so could almost everything in life. It's a huge sight better than nothing. The critical thing is that it has timing information and all the required information to performance monitor the GC.

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That doesn't mean you need to build some huge monitoring infrastructure. With Java you just need a little foresight and some effort looking through the tools we list, and you already have much of what you need out of the box. Turn on GC logging, use jconsole or equivalent, and you are half way there. Better still, use cache and pool classes that publish their stats and are runtime tunable.

The 'low cost' bit is essential. You want to run in production with monitoring turned on. Low cost means low overhead but also low maintenance costs. Consider the volume of logging output. Where does it go, what needs to be kept, is there a rollover strategy, will a problem saturate the disks, and so on. Anyway, that's my 'thing every programmer should know'.

Now on with this month's newsletter. We have all our usual Java performance tools, news, and article links. Javva The Hutt writes in praise of Verity Stob; there's a new cartoon at fasterj Concurrency vs. Parallelism; 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.

• JavaFX 1.2.1 is out, faster, better, cheaper. Which, as every engineer knows, is only possible when there is still a long way to go to maturity.
• Interesting though simple examples of a couple of different monitoring diagnostics.
• Java vs C performance ... again. Well, he says 'again' but I thought this was pretty much the most objective and accurate of these comparisons I've seen
• major features: smaller download, smaller memory footprint, faster startup, G1 garbage collector, 64-bit speed & memory improvements, scalable asynchronous I/O operations, lightweight fork/join framework, generalized barriers and queues, a concurrent-reference HashMap, fences to control fine-grained read/write ordering.
• MuleSoft launcheS Tcat Server, tomcat server with monitoring

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• IBM Real Time Application Execution Optimizer for Java
• HeapAnalyzer updated
• Mulesoft monitoring for tomcat

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Articles

• G1: Java's Garbage First Garbage Collector (Eric J. Bruno/DrDobbs)
• Simple logging tip (Kirk Pepperdine/Pepperdine)
• destroyApp() Is Your Friend (Vikram Goyal/Sun)
• The Law of the Xerox Copier (Heinz M. Kabutz/The Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Software Longevity Testing (Steven Woody/BetterSoftware)
• Performance Improvement: Bigger and Better (Robert Bogue/Gamelan)

Jack Shirazi

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