Latest entries from kirk.blog-city.com

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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Math Puzzle

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:08:00 GMT

My youngest who is in 4th grade keeps coming home with challenging math problems. I found this one interesting. ABCD + ABC + AB + A = 4321, what are the digits represented by the letters A, B, C, and D.

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Recruiters and Recruitment, Lets Not Fool Ourselves

Kirk Pepperdine — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:00:00 GMT

TechRepulic offered up a bit of flame bait today and I bit. The subject was the age old question of the recruiters top question, how much are you currently making.The salary or rate question is one that I've never felt comfortable with. First it&

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Your JavaONE Proposal Has Been Rejected

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:10:00 GMT

This year I was involved in reviewing JavaONE abstracts and as decision day closes in, I'm torn about the number of high qualiity talks that will be rejected.I can imagine where you've spoken at your local JUG. Everything went well and everyo

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JFokus 2009

Kirk Pepperdine — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 07:33:00 GMT

Just getting back from JFokus in Stockholm where I presented both a University and general session. The cool thing was the speakers gift. Following on from ORedev, the conference made a donation in the speakers name to a charity. While Oredev was giv

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Seriously Funny Latency

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:51:00 GMT

Alan forwarded this very funny video showing how shouting in the data center increases disk latency. The video reminded me of a the real problem vibrations were causing me at my first job after graduation. I had to use a micro gram scale to weigh r

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Premature Optimizations, The Rest of the Story

Kirk Pepperdine — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:02:00 GMT

Donald Knuth is often cited as being the author of the quote, "premature optimizations are the root of all evil." Even Wikipedia has the infamous quote attributed to Knuth. If Wikipedia says it's true, then it must be true. Well, I fou

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Goodbye Javapolis, hello Devoxx

Kirk Pepperdine — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:52:00 GMT

This year marked the end of Javapolis and the beginning ot Devoxx. Javapolis died when Sun and the conference organizers failed to come to an agreement about the name. Though it was a loss that caused pain for both sides, what has emerged is somethin

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Thread-safe non-synchronized read/writes?

Kirk Pepperdine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:56:00 GMT

I got into a discussion with Jevgeni and Heinz about some code that Jevgeni was working on. He needed threads to do something every 1/2 second. These thread could apparently look at the timer very very frequently so he didn't want to synchronize.

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Generating Parsers with JavaCC

Kirk Pepperdine — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 11:26:00 GMT

JavaCC is a tool that I've found that I can quickly hack together a simple parser with minimal effort. That said, I'm not in the business of building parsers so it's a need that only comes along once in a blue moon. So, I'm very glad

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