JDK1.6.0_19 is released

No major news just a few bug fixes...
BTW JDK1.6.0_18 included a new version of the VisualVM which is much more powerful and also includes a sampler..... so I was very anxious to see if 1.6.0_19 includes visualvm1.2.2 but it does not ....
Never mind we can always download it directly from the website....

AWS is offering consolidated billing system

It took them one year but finally......
If you are a company and wanted to use AWS you every user needed to create an acoount and enter billing details.
This is very cumbersome and does not enable centralized management and tracking of cloud costs.
Since not it is going to be changed. You will be able to consolidate all your acoount and get aggregated report for your organization.
I guess that now it will be also possible to limit an acoount budget according to the organization policy.....
Kudos Amazon

Cloud era: Pay for your poor performance

I have read an interesting post which claims that in the cloud computing era poor performance directly converts to higher operational costs. http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/Price-for-Performance
I agree with this to some extent. Paying for machines is not exactly as paying for CPU but the general idea is interesting.
Thinking about it a bit more it makes me wonder that it will be nice to be able to find the equilibrium point of performance investigation investment. The amount of money that you invest of performization should be less than the amount of time you loose for inefficiency.
A new research area is born :-)

diagnosis tools for JDK 1.6

A nice Sun document on diagnosis tools for JDK 1.6
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/monitoring/

KSE2 is around the corner

Hi,
On the 17th of November the second Knowledge share event is going live.
It will include 3 sessions:
1. Fork/Join Framework
2. What makes good performance
3. Short stories on simple tools

For more info and registration
http://www.performize-it.com/kse/kse2

Mac OSX Snow leopard better performance

I have upgraded my Macbook to Snow Leopard this weekend and indeed experienced better performance. I have bumped into an interesting article which explains why : (follow link )
To make short story shorter Mac maps 32bit processes to two 4GB address spaces one for user mode and one for kernel mode. As a result any kernel mode system call will require a TLB flush.
Windows by limiting user address space to 2GB and kernel address space to 2GB do not suffer from this problem (but suffer from much lower memory limit). Snow leopard is full 64 bit which solves this issue. User mode and kernel mode address space share the same TLB

A few comments on my previous post

When you are able to RDP to console session. Most of the times you will be able to connect to the process if you will give it the pid from the windows task manager.
jps which lists only java processes will not work. However jconsole -p will. So there are cases where this technique is not required.

However there are cases when you are not able to connect to the console session. In that case enabling interaction with console option will not help but you can still communicate with files.
Just write a batch file and execute it with cmd.exe -C
you can redirect your input and output to files so you will be still able to communicate with the shell