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Looking back over the year, I can't say that anything dramatic happened in the Java performance space. Oracle's takeover of Sun is certainly dramatic for Java, but there has been no effect - positive or negative - on Java performance. Java is still the most used language, and the JVM has increased the number of languages for which it has become the chosen underlying platform, though again none of this is performance specific.

For Java performance, this year has instead been a story of trends. JFX achieved performance good enough to compete in the RIA arena; consolidation in the java tools space continued, but was over matched by the new Java performance tools coming on to the market; the G1 garbage collector looks to be a useful addition for garbage collection tuning options; increasing virtualization means you have to be even more careful about exactly what you are measuring when profiling; and although the credit crunch has decreased the number of live sites and blogs with Java performance stuff, the remaining sites seem to have compensated so that apart from a dip in the second quarter, I haven't really seen any reduction in quantity or quality of new stuff to mention in my newsletters.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Also worth mentioning is what didn't change this year: multi-core support and increasing concurrency is still where the hot action is; profiling concurrency issues is still the most challenging area of performance; and the performance issues that you encounter are just the same as they have been for years - and they are, in order of decreasing frequency encountered: database access; memory leaks; distributed applications; concurrency; garbage collection. (Raw execution speed has not been a significant issue for many years now for most Java applications.)

Now on with this month's newsletter. We have all our usual Java performance tools, news, and article links. Javva The Hutt updates us on how his jobs searching went;and, as usual, we have extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Servlet 3.0 Preview
• New language features in Java 7
• Cloud computing means performance costs are precisely measured - good point
• Design your app for an in-memory database
• memcached + MySQL can provide a 10x performance boost over MySQL alone; memcached on it's own is another 10x faster
• 850 million-plus Java-enabled desktops and "10 billion-ish" Java-enabled devices including the Kindle, Blu-ray disk players, smartphones, many cell phones - Java is buried in 2.6 billion phones from the relatively dumb phones available for $20 to the latest generations of BlackBerrys and Android phones.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center
• TAPE - Test Automation for Performance Engineering
• OKTECH Profiler is a low-impact, sampling and instrumentation profiler for Java
• Monitoring the HTTP Traffic in a JSF Redirect

Articles

• The problem with SLA monitoring in virtualized environments (Andreas Grabner/dynaTrace)
• WalkingCollection (Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz/The Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Multithreading and the Java Memory Model (Chris Wong/JavaLobby)
• Why are Facebook, Digg, and Twitter so hard to scale? (Todd Hoff/highscalability)
• Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems (Jeff Dean/Google)
• Java Performance Tuning, Profiling, and Memory Management (vikaswaters/JavaLobby)

Jack Shirazi

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