Java Performance Tuning

Come join me on the beautiful Island of Crete where we will engage in serious training program written from experiences drawn from our performance tuning engagements and discussions with other experts from around the world.

Why Crete?

While we wanted to provide you with what we've been told is a master class course, we wanted to do it in an environment where you are both focus on learning and then focus on relaxing without the distractions of day to day living. We encourage participants to bring spouses and indeed they have. We have selected a number of hotels that serve the needs of the course yet offer an environment where families can also enjoy the day. They are close to some of the finest beaches which your family will be sure to enjoy.

The courses are run in May and September for two reasons. First the weather in May and September is still offers great opportunities for you to get out an relax and without having to fight the holiday crowds. Secondly these months are still considered low season making the entire experience less expensive than if we were to offer this as a high street course in London.

What will you learn?

Performance tips all come with a shelf life that is linked to the particular technology to which they are applied. Once that technology changes or is not longer used, the tips become useless at best and harmful at worst. For this reason we have purposely designed a course that focuses on providing you with something more than just tricks to get the latest and greatest framework to meet your performance needs. One of the tools we aim to leave you with is a methodology that we've used other the years on a regular basis. This methodology has helped us quickly identify and solve hard performance issues.

The other equally important aspect of performance tuning is tooling. A good portion of the course focuses on a number of open source tools that we have found to be useful in our campaigns to stamp out performance bottlenecks.

Beyond methodology and tooling, we look at some of the fundementials of Java technology. This includes the inner workings of the Java memory management and HotSpot/JIT technologies.

Objectives

The object of this course is to:

• how to apply rigor to the task of performance tuning
• how to setup a performance tuning environment
• importance of performance tuning requirements and goals
• tools needed to conduct a performance investigation
• benchmarking and micro-benchmarking skills
• Java memory and execution models

Outline

Day 1 Introduction to Performance

• Defining performance and performance tuning
• Performance tuning methodology
• Model describing the system under investigation
• Applications of the model to direct the tuning process
  
• Importance of responsiveness
• Effective use of monitoring in diagnosis performance problems
• Performance testing
• Load, stress, and endurance testing
• Load test harnesses
  

Day 2 Consumers of the CPU

• System monitoring
• Tools for system monitoring
• Memory management
• Sun garbage collection
• IBM garbage collection
  
• Object life cycles
  
• Monitoring garbage collection
• Tools for garbage collection analysis
  

Day 3 Latency

• Tools to find latency
  
• Inter-process communications monitoring
• Tools for monitoring inter-process communications
  
• JDBC monitoring
  
• Threading and concurrent
  
• Java Managment eXtentions (JMX)
• Profiling tools
  
• Execution profiling
• Memory profiling
• Memory leak characterization
• Thread dump analysis

Day 4 Performance Tuning

• Performance tuning tactics
  
• Getting big gains first
• Psychology of performance tuning
  
• Micro benchmarking
• Macro benchmarking
• Factors that affect benchmarks
• Analysis of benchmarking results
• Review of collections
  
• Serialization

Joining Us

If you would like to attend this course please email kirk (at) kodewerk.com for more information. If you have trouble convincing your boss that sending you to Crete for training is a good idea email us and we will be glad to assist.