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Do Java 6 threading optimizations actually work?

Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.

Jeroen Borgers
on Jun 18, 2008
Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay

eBay Distinguished Architect at eBay Randy Shoup explains eBay key scalability practices of partitioning, horizontal scale, avoiding XA, asynchronicity, and virtualization. eBay has hundreds of millions of users, over a billion page views a day, and petabytes of data in their systems.

Randy Shoup
on May 27, 2008
Scalability Principles

At the simplest level, scalability is about doing more of something. This could be responding to more user requests, executing more work or handling more data. This article presents some principles and guidelines for building scalable software systems.

Simon Brown
on May 21, 2008
Spectacular Scalability with Smart Service Contracts

Scalability isn't the Boolean value stateless design tends to assume. Udi’s team averts a second failure using service contracts to address multiple dimensions of scale.

Udi Dahan
on Apr 10, 2008
Real-Time Java for the Enterprise

Simon Ritter explains the vision and capabilities of the Real-Time Java specification (RTSJ), if your Java app really, really must respond within a certain time regardless of what the garbage collector does, RTSJ is now a possibility rather than a probability.

Simon Ritter
on Mar 10, 2008
Implementing Master-Worker with Terracotta

A real world case study of a consultancy that distributed the load & increased scalability of its applications using Terracotta using the Master/Worker pattern.

Ben Teese James Heanly
on Feb 05, 2008
Ruby Concurrency, Actors, and Rubinius - Interview with MenTaLguY

With Erlang popularizing Actors, Rubinius adding its Multi-VM, and Ruby 1.9 adding another concurrency primitive with Fibers (Coroutines), a lot of things are going on in the Ruby concurrency world. So we interviewed MenTaLguY, who works on Rubinius, JRuby and many aspects of concurrency in the Ruby world.

Werner Schuster
on Jan 31, 2008
Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!

'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.

Ryan Slobojan
on Dec 20, 2007
Asynchronous, High-Performance Login for Web Farms

Often during my consulting engagements I run into people who say, "some things just can't be made asynchronous" even after they agree about the inherent scalability that asynchronous communications pattern bring. One often-cited example is user authentication - taking a username and password combo and authenticating it against some back-end store.

Udi Dahan
on Dec 03, 2007
Iterative, Automated and Continuous Performance

Iterative and continuous are terms that are often used in reference to testing of software. This new InfoQ article takes a look at whether the same concepts can be applied to performance tuning. Along the way topics such as tooling and mocks are discuss in regards to how they need to be adjusted for performance in respect to testing for functional requirements.

Kirk Pepperdine
on Nov 16, 2007
Java Grid, why do we need it!

In a stream of consciousness that starts from his humble beginnings in IT, John Daves makes plain the importance of IT in the financial sector, the forces driving banks to utilize grid technologies, how Grid plays with SOA, and why you need to be paying attention to this emerging but important technology.

John Davies
on Oct 10, 2007
The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks

Finding performance bottlenecks can be a difficult task and it can get even more difficult as our applications grow in size. The Box is a methodology tool that focuses us efforts to improve performance.If you want to be consistent and predictable, getting rid of the guessing is a must.

Kirk Pepperdine
on Sep 21, 2007