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Todd Hoff over at highscalability is recommended reading for anyone interested in performance of scaled systems, and he occasionally has an excellent contributor. One of our links this month is such, to a guest post from Kris Beevers, founder and CEO of NSONE, describing lessons he's learnt building globally distributed applications.

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The first two tips I extracted from his article are these

"Don't optimize your code, optimize your architecture. Modern systems don't depend on fast code, they depend on managing the communication between interacting systems, and the horizontal scalability of each component."

"Scale horizontally before you worry about efficient code. Servers are fast and cheap, and they're always getting faster and cheaper - developer time isn't. Worry about code optimization only when you find places it really matters."

These are a more modern version of the classic Knuth quote "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%".

Beever's tips are more useful, telling you where to actually focus your effort - on enabling the architecture to scale horizontally and specifically handling the interactions between the components.

Finally, on to our usual links to tools, articles, news, talks and as ever, all the extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles .

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Tuning TCP - The story of one latency spike
• String may become byte arrays wrappers in Java 9 (they've been char array wrappers until now)
• The Unsafe saga, AtomicX, AtomicXFieldUpdater, VarHandles, Memory Regions, ValueTypes, Specialized Generics, 64-bit arrays indexes, immutable (frozen) arrays, ClassDynamic
• Files.lines() doesn't close the open file - it's in the doc but easily missed and could easily cause applications to leak filehandles if not realised
• RoboVM ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler and runtime library for Java is now available

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• JVM for iOS and android
• Retryable operations
• Java Race Condition Catcher
• Splitting Flight Recorder Files

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Articles

• Messaging for IoT (Martyn Taylor/Virtual:JBUG)
• 102 performance engineering questions every software development team should ask (Todd DeCapua/TechBeacon)
• You're probably wrong about caching (Mike Solomon/msol)
• The Core Activities of Performance Testing (Sabrina Nisha/DZone)
• 9.5 Low Latency Decision as a Service Design Patterns (Itai Frenkel/Forter)
• Building Globally Distributed, Mission Critical Applications: Lessons From the Trenches Part 1 (Kris Beevers/highscalability)

Jack Shirazi

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