thekua.com@work » Performance

BCS London Presentation

Patrick — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:44:22 +0000

Thanks to all the people that came along to the BSC London presentation I gave last Wednesday. Despite the threat of weather potentially cancelling our, previously snow-canned, presentation, it went ahead much to my delight. I hope that you all got something out of it. I’ve uploaded the slides here if you’d like it.

Presenting at BCS tonight on agile performance testing

Patrick — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:19:48 +0000

Assuming that people make it to the Covent Garden venue tonight given all the snow conditions, then I’ll be running the Top Ten Secret Weapons for Agile Performance Testing presentation Alistair and I ran at Agile 2009 for the North London British Computer Society branch. Here’s the email detailing it all.

Speaking at Agile 2009

Patrick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:00:08 +0000

I’m excited to announce that I will be running my workshop again, Climbing the Dreyfus Ladder of Agile Practices at the Agile 2009 conference in just over a week’s time. This is the same workshop that I hosted at XP2009 in Italy. In addition to this, my great colleague Alistair Jones and I will also be co-presenting an experience report, Top ten secret weapons for performance testing in an agile environment. Hope you can make it to one of these. I’m really excited to be sharing some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

I’m keeping a page from the session here.

Performance tuning garbage collection

Patrick — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:33:55 +0000

Our current project has a heavy emphasis on throughput and latency, and our team spent a good amount of time building up the infrastructure to be able to performance test our application. We’re currently in the middle of performance tuning, and got to a point where garbage collection is a significant enough problem for us to start looking at options. I’ve never really had to do this low level tuning before and it’s amazing to see how many options you can tweak. Here’s a few links I’ve found that have been helpful. Please leave a comment if you think there’s more that would be of use and I’ll update the list.

Tuning Garbage Collection for Java 5 – A good background and explanation about some of the basic concepts and terms you need to understand before tuning.
Hotspot FAQ – A long list of questions (some of them quite funny too), with some decent answers.
HotSpot Options – A list of all (?) configurable parameters related to behaviour, performance and debugging.
BEA recommendations for garbage collection – A simple example of what values you might consider setting for a production application server.
A summary for JDK1.4.2 options – Providing a brief summary for an older version of the JVM.
List of all JVM options for Java 6 – Apparently a more complete list of options for Java 6.
Another list of JVM options – Though I’m not sure how up to date this one is. The author also makes mention that the list was compiled with Solaris OS in mind. An older link available here.
Blog entires about tuning – A blog detailing greater performance tuning options and details about some of them.

Please note that we’re using Sun’s JVM in production, and hence performance tuning against that JVM.