Latest entries from kirk.blog-city.com

Video Presentation for Sacramento JUG

Kirk Pepperdine — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:42:00 GMT

I'm in the bay area for my training course when i had a request to speak at a JUG. I was so busy with other things at the time that I didn't pay much attention to the details of the request and just responded, sure, lets do it as long as it h

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Proof that Java is still the fasted language and other random thoughts

Kirk Pepperdine — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:28:00 GMT

A few years back Jack released a newsletter on April 1st that proclaimed Java as the fasted language ever. In that news letter to pointed out "stunning and irrefutable" evidence to support his claim. The email we received in response to tha

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awk????

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:06:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've used awk and like all things that are un-used, they tend to get a bit rusty. Today I needed to parse a column out of a text file and the formatting was very uneven to the put that cut wasn't going to.. well...

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Monty Hall Revisited

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:07:00 GMT

A few weeks ago while sitting on a sunny Greek island I got into a conversation with a friend about the Monty Hall Problem. During the conversation I came up with a hand waving explanation that seemed to satisfy him that the correct solution was to a

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Mixing long and short lived objects

Kirk Pepperdine — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:16:00 GMT

When blog-city was in it’s infancy Alan Williamson wasn’t using a lot of hardware to support the system (new stuff was in the mail). In fact, it was running on a single PIII 850MHz PC with 512M of ram and a single disk.

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97 Things is now live

Kirk Pepperdine — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Kevlin Henney has worked hard to take 97 things ever programmer should know from an idea to a live site. There are many more contributions still in the works. I have a couple more that I'd like to finish in the not too distant future. Congrat Ke

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Attribution

Kirk Pepperdine — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:32:00 GMT

As you can imagine I read just about every performance tuning document that I can find. No surprise, there is a lot of good stuff out there but unfortunately there is also a lot lesser quality information. What is most disappointing is the amount of

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Simple logging tip

Kirk Pepperdine — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:15:00 GMT

Each time I go into a round of preparing for course delivery I try to drop in information about any recurrent problem that I've run into. This time round the recurrent problem is object creation.Included in the list of latest places where I'v

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Nehalem and GC

Kirk Pepperdine — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:46:00 GMT

Today I the pleasure of setting up a benchmark on a duel 8-core Nehalem machine. Funny thing was, the owner of the box thought there were two quad-core chips in the machine but a little investigation demonstrated otherwise.I started running the appli

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Continuous Performance Testing

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:52:00 GMT

It's good to finally see Continuous Performance Testing finally getting some press. I figured it was only a matter of time as it is the next obvious step in the evolution of continuous integration and unit testing. Uncle Bob tiwttered a question

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JavaONE Day 3

Kirk Pepperdine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:14:00 GMT

Day 3 at JavaONE was the best session day so far. It started with a great talk from Neal Ford on testing that sucks less. Big surprises, private doesn’t mean anything and using Groovy can help you test private methods because it doesn’t r

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JavaONE Day 2

Kirk Pepperdine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:03:00 GMT

Day 2 started off very good. I won a Acer Aspire netbook in an Intel./Sun talk on SPEC benchmarks. The SPEC talk was a great introduction into the various benchmarks offered by SPEC. It was also a good opportunity to talk about SPECJMS2007. I think t

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Day 1 JavaONE

Kirk Pepperdine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:33:00 GMT

JavaONE 2009 1 day down, 3 to go. I wish I could give a lot of information about the sessions I attended but with so many things happening, I wasn't able to get to a single session finally attending a the meet the HotSpot team BOF at 9:30pm!The b

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Java on Apple catching up?

Kirk Pepperdine — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:32:00 GMT

Apple has released preview version of Java 10.5 update 4 .siteswap:~ kirk$ java -versionjava version "1.6.0_13"Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03-196)Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02-77, mixed mode)Now to c

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Performance tuning is about applying localized optimizations

Kirk Pepperdine — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:52:00 GMT

I always start my talks with the following disclaimer; "The resemblance of any opinion, recommendation or comment made during this presentation to performance tuning advice is merely coincidental". The slide never fails to both amuse yet ca

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ACCU Roundup

Kirk Pepperdine — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:35:00 GMT

Just back in from the ACCU conference where I first spoke about my non-blocking FIFO. Most of the crowd was heavily engaged in C++ and I saw a number of great talks ranging from Uncle Bob's keynote on software craftsmanship to some previously unk

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Non-blocking almost FIFO

Kirk Pepperdine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:12:00 GMT

I'll start with a warning that entry maybe a bit rambling as I'm using it to help sort out my thoughts more than anything else. As a little side project, I decided to implement a non-blocking almost FIFO. Some of you may point out that Doug L

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Excuse my dust

Kirk Pepperdine — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:52:00 GMT

Well, at long last it has finally happened. I've started to create a real website for my kodewerk domain leaving my kirk.blog-city domain as the only link for my blog. So the website isn't near complete. I've just put a webpage and regist

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Neat Java Heap Dump Trick

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:50:00 GMT

Last week I was in Tallinn teaching my performance tuning course and during the last exercise, one of the attendees wanted to know what was in a cache that they'd instrumented the application to use. Lacking any means to dump the contents of the

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Latency is a performance bug

Kirk Pepperdine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:36:00 GMT

In last months newsletter , Jack wrote about how he spends most of his time looking for latency. I could be wrong but I think he got his inspiration for the piece from an early discussion here where we both said that execution profiling doesn't s

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Windows 7

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Microsoft has been showed up at a number of Java conferences lately. While QCon isn't strictly Java, it does dominate the agenda. This time the eye candy to attract geeks was a large coffee table with a built in touch screen. The device, know as

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Can SSD deliver on it's promises

Kirk Pepperdine — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:53:00 GMT

It's been a while since high end laptops started being sold with solid state drives (SSD). While the hope of some that SSD would decrease power consumption, my hope was that it would also help with latency. My interest was again peaked yesterday

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AtomicReference, I don't get it

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:35:00 GMT

Heinz pinged me on skype with some code he'd scraped out of AtomicReference. So before I start with the rant, here is the code.

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Performace Quiz

Kirk Pepperdine — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:15:00 GMT

I recently completed an in-house tuning course where HR asked me to apply a test at the end of the course. I'm not happy about testing people after a course but the client is the client. So I threw together a couple of questions for the crew that

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Test Doubles for Performance Testing

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:55:00 GMT

One of the ways to performance testing a system that connects to an external system that may not be available in a test environment is to stub out that external system. It should come as no surprise that TDD has the same problems. In fact TDD has a d

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