Performance Within Reach » Misc

Grady Booch, “As you can tell by the very fact that I am blogging I am not dead yet.”

Coder — Wed, 31 May 2006 11:06:00 +0000

IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz

I am inside the ICU at Mayo clinic, just a few hours after my open heart surgery. Steve, my ICU registered nurse, is my eyes and fingers typing this blog. As you can tell by the very fact that I am blogging I am not dead yet.

Wishing you a speedy recovery.

server performance problems due to Hyperthreading?

Coder — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 02:51:38 +0000

Slava Ocks, a developer working on SQL Server 2005 within Microsoft, reported similar problems in a blog posting earlier this month.”Our customers observed very interesting behaviour on high-end HT-enabled hardware. They noticed that in some cases when high load is applied SQL Server CPU usage increases significantly but SQL Server performance degrades,” wrote Ocks.Ocks then detailed testing which showed this behaviour where a system thread â€” in this case one cleaning out blocks of disk cache memory â€” is running at the same time as worker threads. “With Intel HT technology, logical processors share L1 & L2 caches. As you would guess [this] behaviour can potentially trash L1 & L2 caches,” he said.

Hyperthreading hurts server performance, say developers – ZDNet UK News

{Update}
The original story made it to Slashdot… interesting comments in the discussions forum. Apparently, Intel does mention the cache contention issues in their documentation.

OcelotBob writes:

In order for there to be a true benefit to hyperthreading, either the program, the OS or the compiler needs to determine that hyperthreading is enabled, and model the code to only use less than half the cache. It’s been known that way since the beginning, and frankly, is silly that MS is scratching their heads wondering why this is.

Who’s presenting at JavaOne?

coder — Sun, 15 May 2005 09:47:33 +0000

This year they’re having 318 BOFs and Sessions in 8 different Tracks…

BEA — 26 talks: 13 BOFs, 13 Sessions
Google — 2 talks: 1 BOF, 1 Session
IBM — No talks???
Sun — 144 Talks: 71 BOFs, 73 Sessions
Oracle — 16 Talks: 5 BOFs, 11 Sessions
Nokia — 11 Talks: 7 BOFs, 4 Sessions
HP — 2 talks: 1 BOF, 2 Sessions
SAP — 2 talks: 1 BOF, 1 Session
Motorola — 5 talks: 2 BOFs, 3 Sessions
JBoss — 6 Talks: 1 BOF, 5 Sessions
Interface21 — 2 talks: 2 Sessions

15 Talks about or related to NetBeans: 10 Sessions, 5 BOFs
6 Talks about or related to Eclipse: 2 BOFs, 4 Sessions

Other interesting tidbits:

Talks–
. Hans Bohem: Finalization, Threads, and the Javaâ„¢ Technology Memory Model
. Arthur Van Hoff: Tahiti: Designing for the TiVo Platform, Interactive Media Applications Around the Home
. Azul Systems will be giving 3 Sessions.
. Performance Myths Exposed.
. “…We compare tweaked and untweaked code on a wide range of modern Java Virtual Machines (JVM machines) to see what makes Java technology run faster…. nearly all performance tweaks from five years ago are now strictly counterproductive. “
. Speculative Locking: Breaking the Scale Barrier
. “… Speculative Locking allows many threads to speculatively execute at the same time into a locked region. Only threads that actually hit data contention will need to roll back and retry.”
. Network Attached Processing: Tapping 384-Way SMP, 256GB Javaâ„¢ Technology Compute Bricks
. “… network attached processing, a fundamentally new model for delivering massive amounts of compute power to Javaâ„¢ technology-based applications running on existing server hardware, operating systems, and middleware platforms”

Technorati Tags: JavaOne | CodePerformance

MSFT @ JavaOne 2005

coder — Sun, 15 May 2005 08:53:07 +0000

“I, Microsoft, take you, Sun, to be my partner,
loving what I know of you, and trusting what I do not yet know.
I eagerly anticipate the chance to be as admired as you were,
getting to know the force you had become,
and falling in love a little more every day.
I promise to interop, interop and interop with you
through whatever life may bring us.”

2005 will mark the return of Microsoft to JavaOne though they did send a few employees at attend last year, this year as Sun CEO Scott McNealy announced on Friday (13th of May) not only are they a “major” sponsor but they’re also presenting sessions and BOFs.

Their talks:

BOF-9095 On the Couch With Sun and Microsoft
Ray Lai, Sun Microsystems; Simon Guest, Microsoft Corporation; Marina Fisher, Sun Microsystems; Laurence Moroney, Philotic Software Solutions; Dino Chiesa, Microsoft Corporation; Doug Purdy, Microsoft Corporation

BOF-9854 Systems Management Using Web Services and WS-Management
Akhil Arora, Sun Microsystems; Josh Cohen, Microsoft Corporation

TS-3367 Interoperability Between Javaâ„¢ Technology and .NET: More Than Just Web Services
Kevin Wittkopf, Microsoft; Wayne Citrin, JNBridge, LLC

TS-3552 Javaâ„¢ Technology and .NET Interoperability Using WS-* Web Services Architecture
Robert Brewin, Sun Microsystems; Mark Hapner, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Andrew Layman, Microsoft Corporation

TS-3553 Javaâ„¢ and .NET: Interoperability Challenges and Rewards
Mark Nottingham, BEA Systems, Inc.; Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Sun Microsystems, Inc; Dino Chiesa, Microsoft Corporation; Anne Thomas Manes, Burton Group; Simon Fell, Salesforce.com; William Henry, IONA Technologies

TS-9866 Advanced Web Services Interoperability
Simon Guest, Microsoft Corporation; Raghavan Srinivas, Sun Microsystems

Technorati Tags: JavaOne | CodePerformance