Java performance slides from Cliff Click

Cliff Click has posted the slides from his talks at the 2009 JavaOne conference.

If you aren't already familiar with Cliff's work, he's with Azul, the company which makes the custom servers for ultra-high-end Java applications, and he is deeply involved with Java performance issues, particularly those which involve multi-threaded systems.

This year's presentations from Cliff include:

• Alternative Languages on the JVM
  
• This Is Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine; How Modern Architecture Impacts Your Java Apps
• The Art of (Java) Benchmarking
  

The hardware talk basically makes the point that single-processor-performance has pretty well maxed out, and all the action is in making multiprocessor machines, and so the important questions are:

• How well does application software use many CPUs?
• Can the hardware guys provide an adequate memory subsystem ("memory is the new disk", says Cliff)?

The benchmarking slides are a great review of the problems of trying to design and run a decent Java benchmark.

This description of the typical performance cycle is all-too-true:

Typical Performance Tuning Cycle
> Benchmark X becomes popular
> Management tells Engineer: “Improve X's score!”
> Engineer does an in-depth study of X
> Decides optimization “Y” will help
● And Y is not broken for anybody
● Possibly helps some other program
> Implements & ships a JVM with “Y”
> Management announces score of “X” is now 2*X
> Users yawn in disbelief: “Y” does not help them

Also, given our discussion a few weeks ago about the odd sizing of application memory, it was interesting to read that Azul are running benchmarks with 350 Gb heaps.

Anyway, the slides are fascinating, even though (as is often the case) it is hard to read presentation slides without having the listener explain them to you. But they're well worth reading, so: Enjoy!