Nati Shalom’s Blog: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java
…similar solutions for addressing the scalability challenges:
On the Data Tier we see the following:
1. Adding a caching layer to take advantage of memory resources availability and reduce I/O overhead
2. Moving from a database-centric approach to partitioning, aka shards
On the Business Logic Tier:
3. Adding parallelization semantics to the application tier (e.g., MapReduce)
4. Moving to scale-out application models to achieve linear scalability
5. Moving away from the classic two-phase commit and …

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Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle’s System Performance Group and the cofounder of Hotsos.
…doing things an application doesn’t need to do is exactly what makes it slow, unscalable, and—in the end—economically inefficient.

Don’t run reports that nobody reads.
Don’t generate more output than you need.
Don’t execute a business process any more often than the business needs.
Don’t write SQL that visits more blocks in the database buffer cache than necessary.
Don’t update a column’s value to the same value it already has.
Push data when …

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Musings on software » Why choose cmp
…consider the strengths in performance and reduction in development that can be added by leveraging a high-quality CMP container as opposed to developing data access logic using a BMP architecture. I guarantee you’ll be happy with the results.
Excellent post! I couldn’t agree more, the debate mirrors the one around the merits and usefulness of automatic garbage collection. Sure you can manage memory yourself, but how much are you willing to pay for that vs. …

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Intel Developer Forum – Keynote Webcasts
Intel Developer Forum

Steve Pawlowski and Ofri Wechsler: Intel® Core™ microarchitecture and Usages
Paolo A. Gargini: Intel’s Silicon R&D Pipeline
The keynotes of Pat P. Gelsinger (Digital Enterprise), Sean M. Maloney (Mobility), Donald J. MacDonald (The Digital Home) and Justin R. Rattner (Opening Keynote)

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The Multicore Computer Forum Series “ explor[es] the benefits and challenges of Multicore computing.”

High Performance Throughput Computing, Dr. Marc Tremblay, Sun Fellow, Vice President, and Chief Architect, Sun’s Scalable Systems Group
Software and the Concurrency Revolution, Herb Sutter, Microsoft
Architecture Support for Parallel Programming, Dr. Kunle Olukotun, Associate Professor, Stanford University

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Sun Sensible
Uniform Utilization of hardware resources ensures scalability:

Uniform Hardware Utilization Through Time (All program Phases use the hardware uniformly)
Uniform Utilization of Hardware Threads (All Hardware Threads are Busy)
Uniform Use of Software Threads (There are enough threads)
Uniform Cache Set Use in the Cache Hierarchy (No cache sets are over subscribed)
Uniform Physical Memory Use (All memory boards used evenly)
Uniform Virtual Memory Use (No Hot Locks)

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ACM Queue – High-Performance Team – Does your development team have a high-performance mind-set?
If you want to keep producing high-performance software, you must be able to run reproducible, comparable performance tests. Ideally, you’ll have dedicated, standard hardware on which to run these tests; this should be representative of, if not directly comparable with, what your customers run in production. You’ll run a basic set of performance tests as part of your release cycle, plus more comprehensive benchmarks as required.So what …

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Sun Dialogue Programs
(Q): If you have to pick top 10 things that you must monitor on any server to look for performance and/or scalability issues…what would they be?
Richard McDougall (A): Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

CPU: Check idle time and run queue length.
If there’s a CPU bottleneck, check if it’s an application or kernel CPU utilization issue with mpstat: high percentages of users indicate it’s an application issue. High sys may point to high network load …

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