#performance

2 articles

Performance Whack-a-Mole

Optimization isn't a single measurement and a fix. It's whack-a-mole: find the loudest problem, fix it, then look at what the problem was hiding. Jonathan Vogel's second installment in his Java performance series shows this process live, with JFR recordings and flame graphs - including a contention bug that was completely invisible until he pushed the concurrency high enough for it to matter.

The Wrong Boundary

Junior programmers mess up paradigms because they think they're more experienced than they actually are. They end up blaming the system for not working the way they think it should. I trusted the wrong thing, just like a junior programmer: I assumed my tests were wrong, my results were wrong, that I was wrong, and I was - but the error was in the location of the problem.