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Newsletter no. 17, April 26th, 2002

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Hello and welcome to another edition of the JavaPerformanceTuning newsletter. As part of our ongoing commitment to informing our readers about performance tools, from next month we will start two columns on performance tuning tools, presenting one commercial tool and one non-commercial tool each month. If you are a vendor or creator of such a tool, and would like to have your tool presented, please contact me from this page. But do please note that we work on a first-completed, first-published basis.

I'm slipping yet further behind. The number of articles which include useful performance information is still increasing, and I have to pass some to next month. I've listed them in a new backlog section so you don't miss out if you don't care about the extracted tips. Of the categorized articles, we have the usual mixture, a lot of J2EE, a little low-level, a little GUI, and as usual an increasing number on J2ME. In the news, ECperf gives us a nice vendor punch-up, the PetStore hubbub keeps on going, and Sun decides to port the HotSpot concept to J2ME.

Kirk continues his excellent roundup of the dicussion groups, we get extra updates on the ECperf situation, and additionally Kirk introduces The Meadow Muffin Award. Javva has a rant and pronounces C and C++ almost dead, and also introduces us to the first segment of his regular diary. After reading that, you'll understand why he doesn't give his real name. You don't want to miss either of these guys.

If you feel this newsletter could be useful to a friend, why not send them the URL. Note also that Yukio Andoh's Japanese translation will hopefully be available at http://www.hatena.org/JavaPerformanceTuning/ in a while.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

Tools

Recent Articles

All the following page references have their tips extracted in the tips section.

Older Pages

All the following page references have their tips extracted in the tips section.

Backlogged Pages

These are pages which may hold information of interest to the Java performance community, but I haven't had time to read them.

Jack Shirazi


Kirk's roundup

I was busily preparing this months Round-Up when a blizzard of postings appeared on the ECPerf website. First, BEA posts a set of numbers, then IBM follows up with their own. Not to be outdone, BEA counters with an even better BBOP/$ ratio. Wow! Then in drops Pramati and, at last, a note from Borland. I?m thinking, what gives? Why are the J2EE vendors felling a sudden need to awaken the normally dormant ECPerf site? And, what does all of this BBOP stuff mean anyways? Can we really trust a single number to tell the story? It reminds me of my college analytical chemistry class. My partner and I had diligently worked out a five-point calibration curve. Our professor came by, looked at the curve, and made the comment, "why do you have so many data points. Only use one data point and zero. That will give you a perfectly straight line." We, of course, did not follow his advice, as we did not trust ourselves to get the data point in the right spot. Even though obtaining these "extra" data points was time consuming, it gave us the confidence that our test results were correct and that our conclusions were well founded. Though the makers of the ECPerf specification may have learned this lesson in a different manner, they too have demonstrated that they understand that a single number is but one dimension of a multi-dimensional world.

The ECPerf expert group specified that each result set must be contained within a standardized report that conforms to a standardized format. Moreover, no report can be published without being scrutinized by the ECPerf review committee. The committee has strict guidelines on what is acceptable or how they are to reject any submission. IF we look at the ECPerf website, we?ll find that BEA is ahead with a posted result of $7/BBop. Wow, that is a significant improvement from their first posting of 18$/BBop. It smashes IBM?s posting of 13$/BBop. So, it?s clear, WebLogic is currently the cheapest J2EE server to operate. Now, IBMs response on (www.theserverside.com) is that BEA?s test does not represent a real world production system. The ECPerf specification seems pretty clear on this point. Is this just sour grapes from IBM or is there something to it? And, if there is something to IBM?s outcry, why did the ECPerf committee approve the results? Clearly BEA sacrificed BBop/min (7,539.90 vs. 16,696.17/min) to achieve their goal. Even so, this point is totally overlooked in IBM?s statement. So what is IBM objecting to?

If you read through the complete report posted by BEA, you?ll see that they ran their application on a single Dell PowerEdge 4600. Now, if you turn to the golden rules found in table 1 in clause 1 of the ECPerf specification, you?ll find the characteristic "Services should be redundant and fully available with the runtime mapping unknown to the application developer." Is this the basis of IBM?s complaint? IBM does claim that a customer would not deploy an application on such a system and consequently, the test is not real world. Well, I thought about it for a bit and ran through a little calculation that put some redundancy costs into BEA?s test. The new number worked out to be $12/BBop. I then looked at the Q&A posted by Sun after they withdrew their test results and suddenly, my professors long lost words jumped out of the page at me.

In that Q&A document, Sun makes the statement "We feel the testing results do not really prove anything other than the spirit of the ECPerf has been hijacked to show how fast competing hardware/OS/VM products are. Borland, along with the Giga Information Group recommend testing between application servers be conducted on a standardized platform. This is the only way to truly know what the differences are between competing application servers." In other words, ECPerf is sensitive to its environment. Since your environment will likely be much different than others, the best way for you to measure your BBop/$ and BBop/minute metrics is to measure it yourself. On that note, lets look at the interesting performance tidbits that have been discussed this month.

JavaDevTalk

Last month, we introduced JavaDevTalk. This month?s discussion includes a note and a micro-bench mark pointing out a performance bug due to HotSpot not enforcing eight byte alignments of eight byte quantities on the stack. The result is that your code may run up to four times slower. The suggested work around is to add an extra int to force the proper byte alignment. Running with the -server option (JDK1.4) seems to fix the problem. For more information, see bug #4490869

In another high quality posting, a Java programmer is pondering the performance hit of using methods instead of direct access to access variables. In his tests, he could not see a difference until he was performing +1,000,000 iterations. The conclusion: write clean readable code and then optimize the trouble spots. The responses contain a fair warning about running micro-benchmarks.

The JavaRanch

And now partners, lets mosey over to the Saloon at the Javaranch and listen to the boys wag their tongues on the latest performance news. The first table is asking which is better, to place a synchronized block around a static shared DateFormat or to create a new instance for each thread. Well the friendly ranch hand steps in to point out that regardless of whether the data is static or not, synchronizing causes you to take hold of the monitor and lock the entire object. This lock is held until the method exits or wait() is called. If wait() is called, then the thread remains inactive until it?s lucky enough to receive a notify() or notifyAll(). Best be creating a DateFormat per thread given this behavior.

Over at the bar, a couple of greenhorns are pondering on why some JSP tags are hanging out for so long in their JVM. In the end they conclude that the tags are being cached using a soft or weak reference, which would account for their disappearance during a forced GC. A good profiler would put this one to rest once and for all.

On the question of whether or not very long variable and method names can affect performance, the bartender and some ranch hands step forward to set the greenhorn straight. Longer names do take slightly longer to resolve and do increase the size of the class file. Having said this, they all go on to point out that the benefits of readability far outweigh the possible benefits of using shorter names. And of course, one can use an obfuscator if one is interested in cutting down class file size.

Once the bartender had dispensed with this task, he was immediately put back to work explaining what a code coverage tool offers. His answer (borrowed from Borland) was that code coverage tools identify dead code that can be removed. Dead code is code that is unreachable. It also shows execution frequencies. That is, which methods are executed and how much time is spent in each one. This information is the basis of many a performance tuning exercise.

JavaGaming.org

This month, a member of Sun's HotSpot team, Ken Russell, has visited JavaGaming. It would seem that a portion of the HotSpot team is now involved with high performance graphics applications. Ken's contribution is in response to a posting regarding the age-old problem of GC kicking in to cause a pause during redraws. What follows is a great question and answer session between Ken and one of the list members on future directions and thoughts within the HotSpot team. [see http://www.javagaming.org/discus/messages/27/1141.html, a fascinating discussion, still in progress.]

Also, Ken was nice enough to post the URL for the Grand Canyon demo. It?s at http://java.sun.com/products/fjc/tsc/articles/jcanyon. Finally, you can find Ken?s JavaOne talk at http://java.sun.com/javaone/, look for session number 3167.

Another question: is System.arraycopy faster than a for loop for moving data between two int[] buffers? The moderator Jeff provides the short answer that arraycopy is as fast as it gets as it uses special hooks to make a call directly back into the VM. This avoids the JNI data-copying overhead. Since Jeff plugs the relevant chapter in his book, I?ll include the URL here. Try http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance.

The Server Side

Last but certainly not least is the venerable TheServerSide. As you can imagine, there are a number of posting requesting help getting ECPerf going. It seems as if people really are interested in seeing it work for themselves. I applaud their efforts. There was an interesting posting regarding the upper limits of Tomcat. The poster was noticing some performance problems when the traffic reached 400 users. A response did include a clustering suggestion. Unfortunately, bugs in the available plug-in may force one to consider the commercial alternative available from Borland. The estimated cost, $400/CPU.

For those of you who can read French, there is an article posted in the magazine Le Monde Informatique. For those of us who non parlez en francais, the essence of the article is summarized here. The article claims that CMP 2.0 is one to two years away from being ready for prime time. Although they offer few technical details, they claim that they were unable to achieve acceptable performance using CMP 2.0 in Weblogic 6.1 even after using two months of performance tuning help from BEA. In the end, they could not support 50 users. Comparisons were carried out against RDBMS access using Servlets and JDBC, Access via Weblogic and Toplink, and Versant.

And finally, there is a question regarding the possibility of keeping a transaction open over multiple pages. Once piece of advice offered was to cache the information in the HTTP session. Failing that, one could use brute force to store the state information in a local DB.

The Meadow Muffin Award

This month I?d like to introduce the Meadow Muffin Award designed to honor a vendor, group, or individual who publicly release or make outlandish performance related statements. The award honors two comedians, Delmar McGregor and Cecil Wiggins whose antics have forever altered the minds of Silicon Valley North. The rules for the award are fairly basic. The award will be presented on an as needed basis. The Round Up is looking for your nominations. Our fully staffed research team will verify all nominations. Please send all nominations to us.

The Java Pet Store (JPS) is an application designed to demonstrate J2EE technologies. As such, the code is easy to read and understand. Microsoft?s .Net group decided to take the JPS and use it to "prove" that .net out performs the J2EE. In the process, they collapsed JPS from three tiers to two, lost two-thirds of the code and claimed their version ran 28 times faster. All was well until Oracle and IBM picked up the gauntlet and tuned the JPS (whilst maintaining the original architecture) to obtain an 18 times increase over the .NET times ( http://otn.oracle.com/tech/java/oc4j/pdf/9ias_net_bench.pdf), and an even larger performance increase for IBM as reported by James Gosling at JavaOne. In recognition of their outstanding efforts, the first Meadow Muffin shall be awarded to Microsoft?s .Net group. Congratulations to all involved. [That would be the Microsoft marketing department who clearly believe that a tutorial is a real enterprise application -ed].

Kirk Pepperdine.


Javva The Hutt

Did you know there are three and a half million of us? Java developers, that is. About 10,000 to 15,000 went to JavaOne. That means, that about three and a half million of us Java developers didn't go. So if, like me, you didn't go, you are a member of the more than 99% majority. We majority are heavily catered for though. We had day-by-day breakdowns of everything that went on. Day after day. At site after site.

I sent off a few emails to some people who went, saying how nice it was to meet them there, and did they like X's talk, and how about Y's event, not to mention did they get to Z's party. Without exception they all replied how nice it was to meet me too, etc. So there you are guys and gals. You too can be a virtual attendee of JavaOne. All it takes is sifting through a whole lot of repetitive day-by-day accounts.

Next year I'm going to schedule some meetings at JavaOne, only I'll have to cancel at the last minute, or send my excuses for missing, because I'll be delayed by someone's unmissable talk. Boy, what a great alibi. I can probably get twenty people to swear I was there... okay, maybe I should get a life.

Class, discuss why Java is too slow for games.

Why is it that every time I tune into a discussion about whether Java can be fast enough for games, the same brain-dead arguments against always turn up. The latest was over at Slashdot. "It can't be fast enough because its interpreted". "The virtual machine is an extra layer that means it must be slower". "Nothing is going to replace C/C++ because they let you do ...".

YO, MR. BRAIN-DEAD. HERE IS THE NEWS. JAVA IS NOT INTERPRETED ANY MORE. THE JVM IS NOT AN OVERHEAD, IT ALLOWS OPTIMIZATIONS THAT A C-COMPILER CAN ONLY DREAM ABOUT. C REPLACED ASSEMBLER EVEN THOUGH ASSEMBLER PRODUCED FASTER CODE, BECAUSE C WAS MORE PORTABLE AND MORE PRODUCTIVE. JUST LIKE JAVA IS REPLACING C/C++ BECAUSE JAVA IS MORE PORTABLE AND MORE PRODUCTIVE.

Of course, I'm shouting at the wrong people. Mr. Brain-Dead doesn't come here otherwise he would already know these things. But it made me feel better.

Its funny really. I remember in my first job looking at all this C code and thinking "whoah, this is an accident waiting to happen". And I meant that literally, the company produced medical tools. Then later I had a chat with one of the guys who wrote the embedded chips. He told me how every time he used to move jobs, or even change chips for the same firm, he had to pretty much learn a new language. It was still ASM, but every chip had its own instruction set and foibles, and the ASM was always different. His skill wasn't assembler the language, instead it was chip programming. So when C came along and you could transfer the language skills, he and almost every other chip programmer dived in head first. And it was only then that I understood the popularity of C--it was driven by systems programming. Then it snowballed, because if you start with a huge base like that, then lots of tools and training and books become available and then it spreads out. And a huge chunk of people mistakenly thought that it was good for application programming because of the momentum.

So all those people desperately making their last stand defending a standardized assembler language are really geriatric, only they seem to have missed out on the wisdom that comes with age. I really think of C and C++ as the COBOL of this decade. And there isn't going to be another Y2K for all those C/C++ programmers to boost their retirement funds in the upcoming twilight years.

That's not to say that I think C/C++ is dead, not at all. There's still lots of COBOL out there, but its not really a good idea to plan your future on becoming a COBOL programmer.

Diary of a Hutt

March 26. Parsons pops his head round my cubicle and asks about the server performance. Tell him not to worry, its all under control. He goes away looking happy. I go over to bigmouth and ask him what's the problem with the server. He tells me we had a level-SEVERE crash and the admin guys are blaming it on last week's performance patch. Uh-oh. Decide I'd better QA the patch.

March 27. Emergency 7.30 meeting called by Frezian. Scapegoat time. I demand to know who authorized applying the patch to the production system before it had gone through QA. Frezian claims I had okayed the upgrade. I remind him that I signed off the patch to him, then started analyzing his J2ME proposals for performance feasibility. Played a couple more rounds of scapegoat before he recognized that I wasn't backing down and only his signature showed on the audit trail. Meeting resulted in a memo requiring increased communication procedures between development and production. The memo clearly insinuated it was production's fault.

April 8. Weevil gets back from JavaOne+holiday. I tell him all about the keynote speeches, and some of the more interesting talks. When Frezian passes, I loudly ask Weevil why he wasn't at the Monty talk. He mutters something about having a tummy bug from the awful hotel food. Yeah sure. Checking out the local bars is more like. Smirk when Frezian requests a full JavaOne presentation from Weevil on Thursday.

April 11. Bastard Weevil got away with it. He spent the last three days going through the online recordings. He brought in all the freebies to show off, and even covered Monty as if he'd been there.

April 12. Bastard bastard Weevil showed Frezian where protocol requires patches to have been QA'd before signing off to him. Frezian tells me he won't pursue the matter this time, but I'd better get it right in future. Ha! He can't screw me this time because he's already had the post mortem.

(Note: all names have been changed to protect the guilty).

BCNU

Javva The Hutt.


Tips

http://www.sys-con.com/java/article.cfm?id=1408
Combining apps in one JVM (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Kirk Pepperdine). Tips:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/04/03/javaenterprise_tips.html
J2EE worst practices (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Brett McLaughlin). Tips:

http://www.sys-con.com/java/article.cfm?id=1412
Mobile & wireless devices (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author James White). Tips:

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=708&a=23115,00.asp
Database comparison (Page last updated February 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Timothy Dyck). Tips:

http://www.sys-con.com/weblogic/article.cfm?id=58
Why CMP is better than BMP (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Tyler Jewell). Tips:

http://www.sys-con.com/websphere/article.cfm?id=40
JDBC optimizing for DB2 (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author John Goodson). Tips:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtctips/j-jtc0319a.html
Finalizers (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Phil Vickers). Tips:

http://www.messageq.com/systems_management/currie_1.html
Monitoring Networked Applications (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Russ Currie). Tips:

http://java.sun.com/features/2002/03/swinggui.html
Accelerating GUI apps (after 1.4) (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Dana Nourie). Tips:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/J2METechTips/2002/tt0325.html
MIDP tips (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Eric Giguere). Tips:

http://portals.devx.com/Intel/Article/6441
Some (Intel chip) optimization myths debunked. (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author George Walsh). Tips:

http://dev2dev.bea.com/articlesnews/discussion/thread.jsp?forum=1&thread=33
EJB Clustering (Page last updated February 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Tyler Jewell). Tips:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2002/tt0409.html
Assertions (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Glen McCluskey). Tips:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp0410/?loc=j
Java transaction management (JTS) (Page last updated April 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Brian Goetz). Tips:

http://portals.devx.com/datadirect/Article/6338
JDBC Drivers (Page last updated March 2002, Added 2002-04-26, Author Barrie Sosinsky). Tips:

http://www.javaspecialists.co.za/archive/Issue001.html
Deadlocks (Page last updated November 2000, Added 2002-04-26, Author Heinz M. Kabutz). Tips:

http://www.javaspecialists.co.za/archive/Issue002.html
Anonymous inner classes (Page last updated December 2000, Added 2002-04-26, Author Heinz M. Kabutz). Tips:

Jack Shirazi


Last Updated: 2024-02-27
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