Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Kirk Pepperdine
- by Janice J. Heiss
Kirk Pepperdine is not only a JavaOne Rock Star but a Java Champion and a
highly regarded expert in Java performance tuning who works as a
consultant, educator, and author. He is the principal consultant at
Kodewerk Ltd. He speaks frequently at conferences and co-authored the Ant Developer's Handbook.
In the rapidly shifting world of information technology, Pepperdine, as
much as anyone, keeps up with what's happening with Java performance
tuning. Pepperdine will participate in the following sessions:
CON5405 - Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?
BOF6540 - Java Champions and JUG Leaders Meet Oracle Executives
(with Jeff Genender, Mattias Karlsson, Henrik Stahl, Georges Saab)
HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz,
Ellen Kraffmiller Martijn Verburg, Jeff Genender, and Henri Tremblay)
I asked him what technological changes need to be taken into
account in performance tuning. “The volume of data we're dealing with
just seems to be getting bigger and bigger all the time,” observed
Pepperdine. “A couple of years ago you'd never think of needing a heap
that was 64g, but today there are deployments where the heap has grown
to 256g and tomorrow there are plans for heaps that are even larger.
Dealing with all that data simply requires more horse power and some
very specialized techniques. In some cases, teams are trying to push
hardware to the breaking point. Under those conditions, you need to be
very clever just to get things to work -- let alone to get them to be
fast. We are very quickly moving from a world where everything happens
in a transaction to one where if you were to even consider using a
transaction, you've lost." When asked about the greatest
misconceptions about performance tuning that he currently encounters, he
said, “If you have a performance problem, you should start looking at
code at the very least and for that extra step, whip out an execution
profiler. I'm not going to say that I never use execution profilers or
look at code. What I will say is that execution profilers are effective
for a small subset of performance problems and code is literally the
last thing you should look at.And what is the most exciting
thing happening in the world of Java today? “Interesting question
because so many people would say that nothing exciting is happening in
Java. Some might be disappointed that a few features have slipped in
terms of scheduling. But I'd disagree with the first group and I'm not
so concerned about the slippage because I still see a lot of exciting
things happening. First, lambda will finally be with us and with lambda
will come better ways.” For JavaOne, he is proctoring for Heinz
Kabutz's lab. “I'm actually looking forward to that more than I am to
my own talk,” he remarked. “Heinz will be the third non-Sun/Oracle
employee to present a lab and the first since Oracle began hosting
JavaOne. He's got a great message. He's spent a ton of time making sure
things are going to work, and we've got a great team of proctors to help
out. After that, getting my talk done, the Java Champion's panel
session and then kicking back and just meeting up and talking to some
Java heads."Finally, what should Java developers know that they
currently do not know? “’Write Once, Run Everywhere’ is a great slogan
and Java has come closer to that dream than any other technology stack
that I've used. That said, different hardware bits work differently and
as hard as we try, the JVM can't hide all the differences. Plus, if we
are to get good performance we need to work with our hardware and not
against it. All this implies that Java developers need to know more
about the hardware they are deploying to.”
Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.
