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• Fastest reliable way for Clojure (Java) and Ruby apps to communicate

  - by jkndrkn

  Hi There, We have cloud-hosted (RackSpace cloud) Ruby and Java apps that will interact as follows: Ruby app sends a request to Java app. Request consists of map structure containing strings, integers, other maps, and lists (analogous to JSON). Java app analyzes data and sends reply to Ruby App. We are interested in evaluating both messaging formats (JSON, Buffer Protocols, Thrift, etc.) as well as message transmission channels/techniques (sockets, message queues, RPC, REST, SOAP, etc.) Our criteria: Short round-trip time. Low round-trip-time standard deviation. (We understand that garbage collection pauses and network usage spikes can affect this value). High availability. Scalability (we may want to have multiple instances of Ruby and Java app exchanging point-to-point messages in the future). Ease of debugging and profiling. Good documentation and community support. Bonus points for Clojure support. What combination of message format and transmission method would you recommend? Why? I've gathered here some materials we have already collected for review: Comparison of various java serialization options Comparison of Thrift and Protocol Buffers (old) Comparison of various data interchange formats Comparison of Thrift and Protocol Buffers Fallacies of Protocol Buffers RPC features Discussion of RPC in the context of AMQP (Message-Queueing) Comparison of RPC and message-passing in distributed systems (pdf) Criticism of RPC from perspective of message-passing fan Overview of Avro from Ruby programmer perspective

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• Why does reusing arrays increase performance so significantly in c#?

  - by Willem

  In my code, I perform a large number of tasks, each requiring a large array of memory to temporarily store data. I have about 500 tasks. At the beginning of each task, I allocate memory for an array : double[] tempDoubleArray = new double[M]; M is a large number depending on the precise task, typically around 2000000. Now, I do some complex calculations to fill the array, and in the end I use the array to determine the result of this task. After that, the tempDoubleArray goes out of scope. Profiling reveals that the calls to construct the arrays are time consuming. So, I decide to try and reuse the array, by making it static and reusing it. It requires some additional juggling to figure out the minimum size of the array, requiring an extra pass through all tasks, but it works. Now, the program is much faster (from 80 sec to 22 sec for execution of all tasks). double[] tempDoubleArray = staticDoubleArray; However, I'm a bit in the dark of why precisely this works so well. Id say that in the original code, when the tempDoubleArray goes out of scope, it can be collected, so allocating a new array should not be that hard right? I ask this because understanding why it works might help me figuring out other ways to achieve the same effect, and because I would like to know in what cases allocation gives performance issues.

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• Optimizing a "set in a string list" to a "set as a matrix" operation

  - by Eric Fournier

  I have a set of strings which contain space-separated elements. I want to build a matrix which will tell me which elements were part of which strings. For example: "" "A B C" "D" "B D" Should give something like: A B C D 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 4 1 1 Now I've got a solution, but it runs slow as molasse, and I've run out of ideas on how to make it faster: reverseIn <- function(vector, value) { return(value %in% vector) } buildCategoryMatrix <- function(valueVector) { allClasses <- c() for(classVec in unique(valueVector)) { allClasses <- unique(c(allClasses, strsplit(classVec, " ", fixed=TRUE)[[1]])) } resMatrix <- matrix(ncol=0, nrow=length(valueVector)) splitValues <- strsplit(valueVector, " ", fixed=TRUE) for(cat in allClasses) { if(cat=="") { catIsPart <- (valueVector == "") } else { catIsPart <- sapply(splitValues, reverseIn, cat) } resMatrix <- cbind(resMatrix, catIsPart) } colnames(resMatrix) <- allClasses return(resMatrix) } Profiling the function gives me this: $by.self self.time self.pct total.time total.pct "match" 31.20 34.74 31.24 34.79 "FUN" 30.26 33.70 74.30 82.74 "lapply" 13.56 15.10 87.86 97.84 "%in%" 12.92 14.39 44.10 49.11 So my actual questions would be: - Where are the 33% spent in "FUN" coming from? - Would there be any way to speed up the %in% call? I tried turning the strings into factors prior to going into the loop so that I'd be matching numbers instead of strings, but that actually makes R crash. I've also tried going for partial matrix assignment (IE, resMatrix[i,x] <- 1) where i is the number of the string and x is the vector of factors. No dice there either, as it seems to keep on running infinitely.

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• Peculiar JRE behaviour running RMI server under load, should I worry?

  - by darri

  I've been developing a minimalistic Java rich client CRUD application framework for the past few years, mostly as a hobby but also actively using it to write applications for my current employer. The framework provides database access to clients either via a local JDBC based connection or a lightweight RMI server. Last night I started a load testing application, which ran 100 headless clients, bombarding the server with requests, each client waiting only 1 - 2 seconds between running simple use cases, consisting of selecting records along with associated detail records from a simple e-store database (Chinook). This morning when I looked at the telemetry results from the server profiling session I noticed something which to me seemed strange (and made me keep the setup running for the remainder of the day), I don't really know what conclusions to draw from it. Here are the results: Memory GC activity Threads CPU load Interesting, right? So the question is, is this normal or erratic? Is this simply the JRE (1.6.0_03 on Windows XP) doing it's thing (perhaps related to the JRE configuration) or is my framework design somehow causing this? Running the server against MySQL as opposed to an embedded H2 database does not affect the pattern. I am leaving out the details of my server design, but I'll be happy to elaborate if this behaviour is deemed erratic.

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• Overhead of calling tiny functions from a tight inner loop? [C++]

  - by John

  Say you see a loop like this one: for(int i=0; i<thing.getParent().getObjectModel().getElements(SOME_TYPE).count(); ++i) { thing.getData().insert( thing.GetData().Count(), thing.getParent().getObjectModel().getElements(SOME_TYPE)[i].getName() ); } if this was Java I'd probably not think twice. But in performance-critical sections of C++, it makes me want to tinker with it... however I don't know if the compiler is smart enough to make it futile. This is a made up example but all it's doing is inserting strings into a container. Please don't assume any of these are STL types, think in general terms about the following: Is having a messy condition in the for loop going to get evaluated each time, or only once? If those get methods are simply returning references to member variables on the objects, will they be inlined away? Would you expect custom [] operators to get optimized at all? In other words is it worth the time (in performance only, not readability) to convert it to something like: ElementContainer &source = thing.getParent().getObjectModel().getElements(SOME_TYPE); int num = source.count(); Store &destination = thing.getData(); for(int i=0;i<num;++i) { destination.insert(thing.GetData().Count(), source[i].getName(); } Remember, this is a tight loop, called millions of times a second. What I wonder is if all this will shave a couple of cycles per loop or something more substantial? Yes I know the quote about "premature optimisation". And I know that profiling is important. But this is a more general question about modern compilers, Visual Studio in particular.

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• TestDriven.Net 3.0 – All Systems Go

  - by Jamie Cansdale

  I’m pleased to announce that TestDriven.Net 3.0 is now available. Finally! I know many of you will already be using the Beta and RC versions, but if you look at the release notes you’ll see there’s been many refinements since then, so I highly recommend you install the RTM version. Here is a quick summary of a few new features: Visual Studio 2010 supports targeting multiple versions of the .NET framework (multi-targeting). This means you can easily upgrade your Visual Studio 2005/2008 solutions without necessarily converting them to use .NET 4.0. TestDriven.Net will execute your tests using the .NET version your test project is targeting (see ‘Properties > Application > Target framework’). There is now first class support for MSTest when using Visual Studio 2008 & 2010. Previous versions of TestDriven.Net had support for a limited number of MSTest attributes. This version supports virtually all MSTest unit testing related attributes, including support for deployment item and data driven test attributes. You should also find this test runner is quick. ;) There is a new ‘Go To Test/Code’ command on the code context menu. You can think of this as Ctrl-Tab for test driven developers; it will quickly flip back and forth between your tests and code under test. I recommend assigning a keyboard shortcut to the ‘TestDriven.NET.GoToTestOrCode’ command. NCover can now be used for code coverage on .NET 4.0. This is only officially supported since NCover 3.2 (your mileage may vary if you’re using the 1.5.8 version). Rather than clutter the ‘Output’ window, ignored or skipped tests will be placed on the ‘Task List’. You can double-click on these items to navigate to the offending test (or assign a keyboard shortcut to ‘View.NextTask’). If you’re using a Team, Premium or Ultimate edition of Visual Studio 2005-2010, a new ‘Test With > Performance’ command will be available. This command will perform instrumented performance profiling on your target code. A particular focus of this version has been to make it more keyboard friendly. Here’s a list of commands you will probably want to assign keyboard shortcuts to: Name Default What I use TestDriven.NET.RunTests Run tests in context   Alt + T TestDriven.NET.RerunTests Repeat test run   Alt + R TestDriven.NET.GoToTestOrCode Flip between tests and code   Alt + G TestDriven.NET.Debugger Run tests with debugger   Alt + D View.Output Show the ‘Output’ window Ctrl+ Alt + O   Edit.BreakLine Edit code in stack trace Enter   View.NextError Jump to next failed test Ctrl + Shift + F12   View.NextTask Jump to next skipped test   Alt + S   By default the ‘Output’ window will automatically activate when there is test output or a failed test (this is an option). The cursor will be positioned on the stack trace of the last failed test, ready for you to hit ‘Enter’ to jump to the fail point or ‘Esc’ to return to your source (assuming your ‘Output’ window is set to auto-hide).  If your ‘Output’ window isn’t set to auto-hide, you’ll need to hit ‘Ctrl + Alt + O’ then ‘Enter’. Alternatively you can use ‘Ctrl + Shift + F12’ (View.NextError) to navigate between all failed tests.   For more frequent updates or to give feedback, you can find me on twitter here. I hope you enjoy this version. Let me know how you get on. :)

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• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

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• Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter

  - by mbcrump

  So Silverlight Firestarter is over and your sitting on your couch thinking… what now? Well its time to So how exactly can you pimp the Silverlight Firestarter? Well read below and you will find out: 1) Pimp the videos: First we are going to use a program named Juice to download all of the Silverlight Firestarter videos. Go ahead and point your browser to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and download the application. It works on Mac, Linux and PC. After it is downloaded you are going to want to add an RSS feed by clicking the button highlighted below. At this point you are going to want to add the following URL inside the textbox and hit Save: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Silverlight-Firestarter/RSS This RSS feed includes all the Silverlight Firestarter Labs and Presentations located below. The Future of Silverlight Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Select all the videos and click the Download button located below (has blue arrow): Once all the videos are downloaded you will have about 4.64GB of Silverlight fun. You can now move these videos to your MediaServer and watch them with whatever device you want. Put it on an iPad, iPhone.. emm wait I mean WP7 or WMC7.  2) Pimp the Training Material – Download the offline installer for the labs here. This will give you almost a gig of free training materials. Here is the topics covered: Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 You will notice that it install Firestarter to the default of C:\Firestarter. So you will have to navigate to that folder and double click on Default.htm to get started. Now if you followed part one of the pimping guide then you will already have all the videos on your pc. You will notice that once you go into the lab you will get a Lab Document and Source at the bottom of the article. Now instead of opening the Source Folder in a web browser you can just copy the folder C:\Firestarter\Labs into your Visual Studio 2010 Project Folder. This will save a lot of time later.   3) Pimp my Silverlight 5 Knowledge – Always keep reading as much as possible and remember that the Silverlight 5 Beta should come Q1 of 2011 and the final release at the end of 2011. Here are 5 great blog post on Silverlight 5. Scott Gu’s Blog Mary Jo’s Article on Silverlight 5 The Future of Silverlight (Official) Kunal Chowdhury Blog Tim Heuer’s Blog Thats all that I got for now. Have fun with all the new Silverlight content.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Give a session on C++ AMP – here is how

  - by Daniel Moth

  Ever since presenting on C++ AMP at the AMD Fusion conference in June, then the Gamefest conference in August, and the BUILD conference in September, I've had numerous requests about my material from folks that want to re-deliver the same session. The C++ AMP session I put together has evolved over the 3 presentations to its final form that I used at BUILD, so that is the one I recommend you base yours on. Please get the slides and the recording from channel9 (I'll refer to slide numbers below). This is how I've been presenting the C++ AMP session: Context (slide 3, 04:18-08:18) Start with a demo, on my dual-GPU machine. I've been using the N-Body sample (for VS 11 Developer Preview). (slide 4) Use an nvidia slide that has additional examples of performance improvements that customers enjoy with heterogeneous computing. (slide 5) Talk a bit about the differences today between CPU and GPU hardware, leading to the fact that these will continue to co-exist and that GPUs are great for data parallel algorithms, but not much else today. One is a jack of all trades and the other is a number cruncher. (slide 6) Use the APU example from amd, as one indication that the hardware space is still in motion, emphasizing that the C++ AMP solution is a data parallel API, not a GPU API. It has a future proof design for hardware we have yet to see. (slide 7) Provide more meta-data, as blogged about when I first introduced C++ AMP. Code (slide 9-11) Introduce C++ AMP coding with a simplistic array-addition algorithm – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 12-13) index<N>, extent<N>, and grid<N>. (Slide 14-16) array<T,N>, array_view<T,N> and comparison between them. (Slide 17) parallel_for_each. (slide 18, 21) restrict. (slide 19-20) actual restrictions of restrict(direct3d) – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 22) bring it altogether with a matrix multiplication example. (slide 23-24) accelerator, and accelerator_view. (slide 26-29) Introduce tiling incl. tiled matrix multiplication [tiling probably deserves a whole session instead of 6 minutes!]. IDE (slide 34,37) Briefly touch on the concurrency visualizer. It supports GPU profiling, but enhancements specific to C++ AMP we hope will come at the Beta timeframe, which is when I'll be spending more time talking about it. (slide 35-36, 51:54-59:16) Demonstrate the GPU debugging experience in VS 11. Summary (slide 39) Re-iterate some of the points of slide 7, and add the point that the C++ AMP spec will be open for other compiler vendors to implement, even on other platforms (in fact, Microsoft is actively working on that). (slide 40) Links to content – see slide – including where all your questions should go: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads.   "But I don't have time for a full blown session, I only need 2 (or just 1, or 3) C++ AMP slides to use in my session on related topic X" If all you want is a small number of slides, you can take some from the session above and customize them. But because I am so nice, I have created some slides for you, including talking points in the notes section. Download them here. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Application Performance Episode 2: Announcing the Judges!

  - by Michaela Murray

  The story so far… We’re writing a new book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it! If you work with ASP.NET applications, and have top tips, hard-won lessons, or sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing performance problems, we want to hear from you! And if your app uses SQL Server, even better – interaction with the database is critical to application performance, so we’re looking for database top tips too. There’s a Microsoft Surface apiece for the person who comes up with the best tip for SQL Server and the best tip for .NET. Of course, if your suggestion is selected for the book, you’ll get full credit, by name, Twitter handle, GitHub repository, or whatever you like. To get involved, just email your nuggets of performance wisdom to [email protected] – there are examples of what we’re looking for and full competition details at Application Performance: The Best of the Web. Enter the judges… As mentioned in my last blogpost, we have a mystery panel of celebrity judges lined up to select the prize-winning performance pointers. We’re now ready to reveal their secret identities! Judging your ASP.NET  tips will be: Jean-Phillippe Gouigoux, MCTS/MCPD Enterprise Architect and MVP Connected System Developer. He’s a board member at French software company MGDIS, and teaches algorithms, security, software tests, and ALM at the Université de Bretagne Sud. Jean-Philippe also lectures at IT conferences and writes articles for programming magazines. His book Practical Performance Profiling is published by Simple-Talk. Nik Molnar,  a New Yorker, ASP Insider, and co-founder of Glimpse, an open source ASP.NET diagnostics and debugging tool. Originally from Florida, Nik specializes in web development, building scalable, client-centric solutions. In his spare time, Nik can be found cooking up a storm in the kitchen, hanging with his wife, speaking at conferences, and working on other open source projects. Mitchel Sellers, Microsoft C# and DotNetNuke MVP. Mitchel is an experienced software architect, business leader, public speaker, and educator. He works with companies across the globe, as CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. Mitchel writes technical articles for online and print publications and is the author of Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming. He frequently answers questions on StackOverflow and MSDN and is an active participant in the .NET and DotNetNuke communities. Clive Tong, Software Engineer at Red Gate. In previous roles, Clive spent a lot of time working with Common LISP and enthusing about functional languages, and he’s worked with managed languages since before his first real job (which was a long time ago). Long convinced of the productivity benefits of managed languages, Clive is very interested in getting good runtime performance to keep managed languages practical for real-world development. And our trio of SQL Server specialists, ready to select your top suggestion, are (drumroll): Rodney Landrum, a SQL Server MVP who writes regularly about Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. He’s authored SQL Server Tacklebox, three Reporting Services books, and contributes regularly to SQLServerCentral, SQL Server Magazine, and Simple–Talk. His day job involves overseeing a large SQL Server infrastructure in Orlando. Grant Fritchey, Product Evangelist at Red Gate and SQL Server MVP. In an IT career spanning more than 20 years, Grant has written VB, VB.NET, C#, and Java. He’s been working with SQL Server since version 6.0. Grant volunteers with the Editorial Committee at PASS and has written books for Apress and Simple-Talk. Jonathan Allen, leader and founder of the PASS SQL South West user group. He’s been working with SQL Server since 1999 and enjoys performance tuning, development, and using SQL Server for business solutions. He’s spoken at SQLBits and SQL in the City, as well as local user groups across the UK. He’s also a moderator at ask.sqlservercentral.com.

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• WebLogic Server–Use the Execution Context ID in Applications–Lessons From Hansel and Gretel

  - by james.bayer

  I learned a neat trick this week.  Don’t let your breadcrumbs go to waste like Hansel and Gretel did!  Keep track of the code path, logs and errors for each request as they flow through the system.  Earlier this week an OTN forum post in the WLS – General category by Oracle Ace John Stegeman asked a question how to retrieve the Execution Context ID so that it could be used on an error page that a user could provide to a help desk or use to check with application administrators so they could look up what went wrong.  What is the Execution Context ID (ECID)?  Fusion Middleware injects an ECID as a request enters the system and it says with the request as it flows from Oracle HTTP Server to Oracle Web Cache to multiple WebLogic Servers to the Oracle Database. It’s a way to uniquely identify a request across tiers.  According to the documentation it’s: The value of the ECID is a unique identifier that can be used to correlate individual events as being part of the same request execution flow. For example, events that are identified as being related to a particular request typically have the same ECID value.  The format of the ECID string itself is determined by an internal mechanism that is subject to change; therefore, you should not have or place any dependencies on that format. The novel idea that I see John had was to extend this concept beyond the diagnostic information that is captured by Fusion Middleware.  Why not also use this identifier in your logs and errors so you can correlate even more information together!  Your logging might already identify the user, so why not identify the request so you filter down even more.  All you need to do inside of WebLogic Server to get ahold of this information is invoke DiagnosticConextHelper: weblogic.diagnostics.context.DiagnosticContextHelper.getContextId() This class has other helpful methods to see other values tracked by the diagnostics framework too.  This way I can see even more detail and get information across tiers. In performance profiling, this can be very handy to track down where time is being spent in code.  I’ve blogged and made videos about this before.  JRockit Flight Recorder can use the WLDF Diagnostic Volume in WLS 10.3.3+ to automatically capture and correlate lots of helpful information for each request without installing any special agents and with the out-of-the-box JRockit and WLS settings!  You can see here how information is displayed in JRockit Flight Recorder about a single request as it calls a Servlet, which calls an EJB, which gets a DB connection, which starts a transaction, etc.  You can get timings around everything and even see the SQL that is used. http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/web.1111/e13714/using_flightrecorder.htm#WLDFC480 Recent versions of the WLS console also are able to visualize this data too, so it works with other JVMs besides JRockit when you turn on WLDF instrumentation. I wrote a little sample application that verified to myself that the ECID did actually cross JVM boundaries.  I invoked a Servlet in one JVM, which acted as an EJB client to Stateless Session Bean running in another JVM.  Each call returned the same ECID.  You need to turn on WLDF Instrumentation for this to work otherwise the framework returns null.  I’m glad John put me on to this API as I have some interesting ideas on how to correlate some information together.

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• Join our Marketing Intelligence Team in Dublin!

  - by jessica.ebbelaar

  Do you want to work with the brightest minds in the industry? Want to be part of a global team that’s changing the way the world does business? Then Oracle is the place for YOU. Join now as a Marketing Intelligence Representative. You will have the opportunity to develop within the role through working alongside the Business Development, Sales and Marketing teams within Oracle. The Marketing Intelligence Group is viewed as a true talent pool for the Business Development and Sales Teams. Oracle offers a structured training programme for Marketing Intelligence Representatives and Business Development Consultants including our approved sales certified training methodology along with regular product training. Miriam started her career as a Marketing Intelligence Representative six years ago, and shares what she has learned and how her career is progressing. My Career Path at Oracle: June 2005 – October 2005: Profiler in the Marketing Intelligence Team November 2005 - October 2006: Team Leader for MIT November 2006 - February 2008: Business Development Consultant Iberia March 2008 - December 2010: Lead Management Specialist Currently: Sales Program Manager for Iberia & Benelux What did you learn from your role in the Market Intelligence Team Being a Profiler helped me to understand how an organisation works, from the beginning to the end. It is like being in University but being paid! The three key things I learnt in this role are: Knowledge of customers: You are on the phone with over 70 customers daily. Not only does this give you an overview of the IT infrastructure of the customers companies but also how to manage their questions and rejections. Essentially you are learning how to convert their pain and complaints into business opportunities. Knowledge of Oracle: As a Profiler you get an excellent overview of how Oracle works internally, from Marketing to Sales, without forgetting the Operations Team. Knowledge about yourself: As a Profiler I learnt how to work outside of my comfort zone, there is a new challenge almost every day but Oracle are there to support you every step of the way. Oracle really invests in developing the MIT Team and as a Profiler you can expect product and sales training on a monthly basis. How did you progress from MIT to Business Development Group (BDG)? I made sure that my manager knew from the very beginning that I was keen to progress at Oracle and I was set very clear objectives to help me reach my goal.  My manager was very supportive and ensured I received all the training I needed. After I became a Team Leader of Profiling, I moved to an Iberia BDG position. How you feel your experience in MI has helped you in your current role? I truly believe that the MI position gives you a great overview of Oracle and this has really helped me in my current position.  I am the Sales Program Manager for IBERIA & Benelux and in my campaigns I need to target the right companies and the right job specs.  My time in the Market Intelligence team really helped me to understand how to focus and target my campaigns so I know I don’t miss any business opportunities! How would you sum up your Oracle experience? Oracle is a big organisation with big opportunities. With the right skills and with the great training programs that Oracle offer, the only limit is you! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected] You can find all our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Tags van Technorati: Marketing Intelligence,Benelux,Iberia,Profiler,Business Development,Sales Representatives,BDG,Business Development Group,opportunities,Oracle

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• Give a session on C++ AMP – here is how

  - by Daniel Moth

  Ever since presenting on C++ AMP at the AMD Fusion conference in June, then the Gamefest conference in August, and the BUILD conference in September, I've had numerous requests about my material from folks that want to re-deliver the same session. The C++ AMP session I put together has evolved over the 3 presentations to its final form that I used at BUILD, so that is the one I recommend you base yours on. Please get the slides and the recording from channel9 (I'll refer to slide numbers below). This is how I've been presenting the C++ AMP session: Context (slide 3, 04:18-08:18) Start with a demo, on my dual-GPU machine. I've been using the N-Body sample (for VS 11 Developer Preview). (slide 4) Use an nvidia slide that has additional examples of performance improvements that customers enjoy with heterogeneous computing. (slide 5) Talk a bit about the differences today between CPU and GPU hardware, leading to the fact that these will continue to co-exist and that GPUs are great for data parallel algorithms, but not much else today. One is a jack of all trades and the other is a number cruncher. (slide 6) Use the APU example from amd, as one indication that the hardware space is still in motion, emphasizing that the C++ AMP solution is a data parallel API, not a GPU API. It has a future proof design for hardware we have yet to see. (slide 7) Provide more meta-data, as blogged about when I first introduced C++ AMP. Code (slide 9-11) Introduce C++ AMP coding with a simplistic array-addition algorithm – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 12-13) index<N>, extent<N>, and grid<N>. (Slide 14-16) array<T,N>, array_view<T,N> and comparison between them. (Slide 17) parallel_for_each. (slide 18, 21) restrict. (slide 19-20) actual restrictions of restrict(direct3d) – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 22) bring it altogether with a matrix multiplication example. (slide 23-24) accelerator, and accelerator_view. (slide 26-29) Introduce tiling incl. tiled matrix multiplication [tiling probably deserves a whole session instead of 6 minutes!]. IDE (slide 34,37) Briefly touch on the concurrency visualizer. It supports GPU profiling, but enhancements specific to C++ AMP we hope will come at the Beta timeframe, which is when I'll be spending more time talking about it. (slide 35-36, 51:54-59:16) Demonstrate the GPU debugging experience in VS 11. Summary (slide 39) Re-iterate some of the points of slide 7, and add the point that the C++ AMP spec will be open for other compiler vendors to implement, even on other platforms (in fact, Microsoft is actively working on that). (slide 40) Links to content – see slide – including where all your questions should go: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads.   "But I don't have time for a full blown session, I only need 2 (or just 1, or 3) C++ AMP slides to use in my session on related topic X" If all you want is a small number of slides, you can take some from the session above and customize them. But because I am so nice, I have created some slides for you, including talking points in the notes section. Download them here. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

  - by Salil Ravindran

  Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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• Mastering snow and Java development at jDays in Gothenburg

  - by JavaCecilia

  Last weekend, I took the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg to attend and present at the new Java developer conference jDays. It was professionally arranged in the Swedish exhibition hall close to the amusement park Liseberg and we got a great deal out of the top-level presenters and hallway discussions. Understanding and Improving Your Java Process Our main purpose was to spread information on JVM and our monitoring tools for Java processes, so I held a crash course in the most important terms and concepts if you want to affect the performance of your Java process. From the beginning - the JVM specification to interpretation of heap usage graphs. For correct analysis, you also need to understand something about process memory - you need space for the Java heap (-Xms for initial size and -Xmx for max heap size), but the process memory also contain the thread stacks (to a size of -Xss), JVM internal data structures used for keeping track of Java objects on the heap, method compilation/optimization, native libraries, etc. If you get long pause times, make sure to monitor your application, see the allocation rate and frequency of pause times.My colleague Klara Ward then held a presentation on the Java Mission Control product, the profiling and diagnostics tools suite for HotSpot, coming soon. The room was packed and very appreciated, Klara demonstrated four different scenarios, e.g. how to diagnose and fix latencies due to lock contention for logging.My German colleague, OpenJDK ambassador Dalibor Topic travelled to Sweden to do the second keynote on "Make the Future Java". He let us in on the coming features and roadmaps of Java, now delivering major versions on a two-year schedule (Java 7 2011, Java 8 2013, etc). Also letting us in on where to download early versions of 8, to report problems early on. Software Development in teams Being a scout leader, I'm drilled in different team building and workshop techniques, creating strong groups - of course, I had to attend Henrik Berglund's session on building successful teams. He spoke about the importance of clear goals, autonomy and agreed processes. Thomas Sundberg ended the conference by doing live remote pair programming with Alex in Rumania and a concrete tips for people wanting to try it out (for local collaboration, remember to wash and change clothes). Memory Master Keynote The conference keynote was delivered by the Swedish memory master Mattias Ribbing, showing off by remembering the order of a deck of cards he'd seen once. He made it interactive by forcing the audience to learn a memory mastering technique of remembering ten ordered things by heart, asking us to shout out the order backwards and we made it! I desperately need this - bought the book, will get back on the subject. Continuous Delivery The most impressive presenter was Axel Fontaine on Continuous Delivery. Very well prepared slides with key images of his message and moved about the stage like a rock star. The topic is of course highly interesting, how to create an infrastructure enabling immediate feedback to developers and ability to release your product several times per day. Tomek Kaczanowski delivered a funny and useful presentation on good and bad tests, providing comic relief with poorly written tests and the useful rules of thumb how to rewrite them. To conclude, we had a great time and hope to see you at jDays next year :)

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• How Can We Create Blackbox Logs for Nginx?

  - by Alan Gutierrez

  There's an article out there, Profiling LAMP Applications with Apache's Blackbox Logs, that describes how to create a log that records a lot of detailed information missing in the common and combined log formats. This information is supposed to help you resolve performance issues. As the author notes "While the common log-file format (and the combined format) are great for hit tracking, they aren't suitable for getting hardcore performance data." The article describes a "blackbox" log format, like a blackbox flight recorder on an aircraft, that gathers information used to profile server performance, missing from the hit tracking log formats: Keep alive status, remote port, child processes, bytes sent, etc. LogFormat "%a/%S %X %t \"%r\" %s/%>s %{pid}P/%{tid}P %T/%D %I/%O/%B" blackbox I'm trying to recreate as much of the format for Nginx, and would like help filling in the blanks. Here's what Nginx blackbox format would look like, the unmapped Apache directives have question marks after their names. access_log blackbox '$remote_addr/$remote_port X? [$time_local] "$request"' 's?/$status $pid/0 T?/D? I?/$bytes_sent/$body_bytes_sent' Here's a table of the variables I've been able to map from the Nginx documentation. %a = $remote_addr - The IP address of the remote client. %S = $remote_port - The port of the remote client. %X = ? - Keep alive status. %t = $time_local - The start time of the request. %r = $request - The first line of request containing method verb, path and protocol. %s = ? - Status before any redirections. %>s = $status - Status after any redirections. %{pid}P = $pid - The process id. %{tid}P = N/A - The thread id, which is non-applicable to Nignx. %T = ? - The time in seconds to handle the request. %D = $request_time - The time in milliseconds to handle the request. %I = ? - The count of bytes received including headers. %O = $bytes_sent - The count of bytes sent including headers. %B = $body_bytes_sent - The count of bytes sent excluding headers, but with a 0 for none instead of '-'. Looking for help filling in the missing variables, or confirmation that the missing variables are in fact, unavailable in Nginx.

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• What Are All the Variables Necessary to Create Blackbox Logs for Nginx?

  - by Alan Gutierrez

  There's an article out there, Profiling LAMP Applications with Apache's Blackbox Logs, that describes how to create a log that records a lot of detailed information missing in the common and combined log formats. This information is supposed to help you resolve performance issues. As the author notes "While the common log-file format (and the combined format) are great for hit tracking, they aren't suitable for getting hardcore performance data." The article describes a "blackbox" log format, like a blackbox flight recorder on an aircraft, that gathers information used to profile server performance, missing from the hit tracking log formats: Keep alive status, remote port, child processes, bytes sent, etc. LogFormat "%a/%S %X %t \"%r\" %s/%>s %{pid}P/%{tid}P %T/%D %I/%O/%B" blackbox I'm trying to recreate as much of the format for Nginx, and would like help filling in the blanks. Here's what Nginx blackbox format would look like, the unmapped Apache directives have question marks after their names. access_log blackbox '$remote_addr/$remote_port X? [$time_local] "$request"' 's?/$status $pid/0 T?/D? I?/O?/B?' Here's a table of the variables I've been able to map from the Nginx documentation. %a = $remote_addr - The IP address of the remote client. %S = $remote_port - The port of the remote client. %X = ? - Keep alive status. %t = $time_local - The start time of the request. %r = $request - The first line of request containing method verb, path and protocol. %s = ? - Status before any redirections. %>s = $status - Status after any redirections. %{pid}P = $pid - The process id. %{tid}P = N/A - The thread id, which is non-applicable to Nignx. %T = ? - The time in seconds to handle the request. %D = ? - The time in milliseconds to handle the request. %I = ? - The count of bytes received including headers. %O = ? - The count of bytes sent including headers. %B = ? - The count of bytes sent excluding headers, but with a 0 for none instead of '-'. Looking for help filling in the missing variables, or confirmation that the missing variables are in fact, unavailable in Nginx.

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• Drupal on an NFS share has terrible performance

  - by Marcus

  We have a setup where a Drupal 7 site with the following setup - a VMware ESXi 4.1 host server running a web vm and an NFS VM. The web VM is using Apache and mod_php. The site is still in development thus we have to turn off all forms of caching due to the frequently-updated files. Each page request takes around 15-20 seconds to complete. Profiling the PHP code shows that the vast majority of time (normally over 90%) is taking by all the is_dir(), is_file() function calls that load up the modules. I've increased PHP's realpath cache size to several megs and an strace shows that the lstat calls then drop from over 200 to around 6 and stat() decreases a bit (around 600 calls). However, while this has shaved off quite a bit of time, I am simply unable to break past the 10 second per request barrier. Is there a way to get better performance out of this setup that doesn't involve caching? Configs and stats: VMs: web - Centos 6 64bt, 2.5GB RAM, normal CPU/HD prioritisation nfs - Centos 6 64bt, 2GB RAM, normal CPU priority, high HD priority PHP: 32M realpath cache size (it's this high for testing purposes) NFS: ~]# egrep -v '#|^$' /etc/nfsmount.conf [ NFSMount_Global_Options ] Defaultvers=4 Ac=False Rsize=32k Wsize=32k Bsize=32k Reading speeds via NFS are not an issue a dd of a 100M test file using 32k blocks returns: 3200+0 records in 3200+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.84984 s, 56.7 MB/s real 0m1.857s user 0m0.007s sys 0m0.330s Strace on Apache process with empty realpath cache: % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 50.78 1.157452 337 3434 28 stat 32.58 0.742656 628 1182 425 open 9.29 0.211788 762 278 1 lstat 3.17 0.072322 0 237865 write 2.45 0.055839 490 114 13 access 0.45 0.010262 43 237 brk 0.34 0.007725 10 811 74 read 0.28 0.006340 9 679 fstat 0.22 0.005069 18 281 poll 0.20 0.004533 6 698 getdents 0.09 0.001960 10 190 mmap 0.05 0.001065 14 74 accept4 0.04 0.001000 333 3 chdir 0.03 0.000750 4 190 munmap 0.01 0.000339 0 836 close 0.01 0.000247 3 75 writev 0.00 0.000068 0 611 fcntl 0.00 0.000063 1 77 shutdown 0.00 0.000000 0 1 lseek 0.00 0.000000 0 5 rt_sigaction 0.00 0.000000 0 1 rt_sigprocmask 0.00 0.000000 0 3 setitimer 0.00 0.000000 0 5 socket 0.00 0.000000 0 5 5 connect 0.00 0.000000 0 74 getsockname 0.00 0.000000 0 15 setsockopt 0.00 0.000000 0 5 getcwd 0.00 0.000000 0 1 futex ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- Strace after realpaths are cached % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 60.14 1.371006 484 2831 28 stat 31.79 0.724705 627 1155 425 open 3.53 0.080354 0 237865 write 2.65 0.060433 530 114 13 access 0.43 0.009913 99 100 brk 0.38 0.008730 11 804 74 read 0.35 0.007910 12 675 fstat 0.30 0.006775 10 654 getdents 0.13 0.003065 11 281 poll 0.09 0.002000 333 6 1 lstat 0.07 0.001545 2 807 close 0.05 0.001063 14 74 accept4 0.04 0.001000 6 179 mmap 0.02 0.000404 2 179 munmap 0.01 0.000271 4 75 writev 0.01 0.000212 0 611 fcntl 0.01 0.000129 2 77 shutdown 0.00 0.000022 0 74 getsockname 0.00 0.000000 0 1 lseek 0.00 0.000000 0 5 rt_sigaction 0.00 0.000000 0 1 rt_sigprocmask 0.00 0.000000 0 3 setitimer 0.00 0.000000 0 3 socket 0.00 0.000000 0 3 3 connect 0.00 0.000000 0 15 setsockopt 0.00 0.000000 0 5 getcwd 0.00 0.000000 0 3 chdir ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- Mount: nfs.xxx.xxx.xxx:/path/to/website/files on /path/to/website/files type nfs (rw,hard,intr,noac,vers=4,addr=xx.xx.xx.xx,clientaddr=xx.xx.xx.xx) Any help is, naturally, appreciated.

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• 2nd Year College - Learning - Microsoft Server Products

  - by Ryan

  As the title says, I just finished my first year of college (majoring in Software Engineering). Fortunately my school likes Microsoft enough, and I can get pretty much anything I want that Microsoft sells. I also can get IBM Websphere and the like for free as well. Earlier this year, I set up an oldish computer (2.6 Pentium D, x64) to run ubuntu server headless. I'm predominately a Java developer, so Apache, Maven, Nexus, Sonar, SVN, etc made it onto the machine. It worked really well for personal and school projects, especially team projects (quick ramp up). Anyways, I started to pick up C# to complement my Java knowledge (don't judge me :P), and am interested in working with some of the associated Microsoft equivalents. The machine currently has the Ubuntu install, as well as Windows 7 Ultimate. I do all of my actual development work off my laptop, also running Windows 7 Ultimate. I was wondering what software you would recommend putting on the machine. I’m not actually serving anything off the machine itself, but in Ubuntu I had it doing integration tests with Hudson on every commit, and profiling my applications, etc, etc. The machine would be running headless, and I would remote into it. Here is what I am currently leaning towards / wondering about: Windows 7 Ultimate vs Windows Server 2008 (R2) (no one is really clear why I should go with one over the other) Windows Team Foundation Sharepoint (Never used it before, kind of meh about it) IBM Websphere or Glassfish (Some Java EE web server) SQL Server 2008 A DVCS In order to better control product conflicts / limit resource use, I’m wondering if I should install things into virtual machines (I can get VmWare or Microsoft Virtualization Products) I also plan on installing everything I had running under Linux (it’s almost entirely Java based development software, so it’ll run on both, only reason I went with ubuntu during the year was because the apache build seemed better). I’m primarily looking to become familiar with enterprise software development tools, as well as get something functional that will help my development process. (IE, I’ll still use project and assign tasks even though I might be the only one to assign tasks to, just to practice doing so). Is there any other software / configuration details I should explore? Opinions on my current list? I primarily use C#, Java, and PHP. I'm familiar with ruby, and python as well. Thanks!

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• On ESXi, guest machines hang for significant intervals compared to real machines. How can I fix this?

  - by Tarbox

  This is ESXi version 5.0.0. We plan on upgrading to 5.5 eventually. I have four code profiles, two taken on a real, unvirtualized machine, two taken on a virtual machine. Ordering the list of subroutines by time spent in each one, the two real profiles are practically identical. The two virtual profiles are different from each other and from the real profiles: a subset of subroutines are taking a lot more time on the virtual machines, and the subset is different for each run. The two virtual profiles take a similar amount of time, which is 3 times the amount of time the real profiles take. This gross "how long does it take?" result is consistent after hundreds of tests across three different virtual machines on two different host machines -- the virtual machine is just slower. I've only the code profiling on the four, however. Here's the most guilty set of lines: This is the real machine: 8µs $text = '' unless defined $text; 1.48ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { This is the first run on the virtual machine: 20.1ms $text = '' unless defined $text; 1.49ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { This is the second run on the virtual machine: 6µs $text = '' unless defined $text; 21.9ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { My WAG is that the VM is swapping out the thread and then swapping it back in, destroying some level of cache in the process, but these code profiles were taken when the vm in question was the only active vm on the host, so... what? What does that mean? The guest itself is under light load, this is a latency problem for my users rather than throughput. The host is also under a light load, if I knew what resources to assign where, I could do it without worrying about the cost. I've attempted to lock memory, reserve cpu, assign a restrictive affinity, and disable hyperthread sharing. They don't help, it still takes the VM 2-4x the amount of time to do the same thing as the real machine. The host the tests were run on is 6x2.50GHz, Intel Xeon E5-26400 w/ 16gigs of ram. The guest exhibits the same performance under a wide combination of settings. The real machine is 4x2.13GHz, Xeon E5506 w/ 2 gigs of ram. Thank you for all advice.

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• Wireless Network suddenly cant connect after Windows update

  - by vinir

  UPDATE: As my patience started to end, the laptop started to display symptoms of other malfunctions, so I ended up returning it to Asus and actually had the price of the laptop back in store credit. I did not solve the problem per se, but as I don't have the notebook and the screen, the keyboard, the touchpad and other parts were malfunctioning, I can safely assume that it was put to rest. I don't know how to behave when my question isn't actually answered, but was "solved", so I placed this over here. Anyone that knows how to end this topic, I would appreciate the heads up. Thanks for everything, everyone, it's nice to see that this topic in the community was active even when all this time had passed. vinir So I bought an ASUS K43E notebook earlier this year and built a wireless conection to link it to. It worked great for the first weeks, but then I updated my Windows 7 Home Basic with the daily updates; After that my home network couldn't be reached no matter what I did. I have linux on dual boot on the same notebook and it can connect to my home wireless network flawlessly. I have a hunch that it's somehow related to the Network Profile settings. I have noticed my network was set as "Home network", but after the system updates I got changed to "Public". Now I can't connect to it to change the profile settings. My Atheros Network adapter is updated to the latest driver (march 2012), and I still can't connect. The funny thing is that the same thing happened to my mother's notebook, as it has the same Network Adapter, Atheros AR9285, as I recall it. I managed to fix it on my mother's computer by using an specific network LSP and profiling reset that was available through her notebook's antivirus program, avast! Internet Security. I can't get that to work on my notebook, but I suspect that some related tool might just make it work too. So the question is: how to modify a network's profile and settings that were stored in my notebook? I can't connect to the specific network on Windows, as stated before.

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• Some New .NET Toys (Repost)

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft. The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of. The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today. Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1. You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)? Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox). With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target. Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks. Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment. This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight. You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model. Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here. You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/. This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform. If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs. You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others. Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies. By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done. Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need. I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities. Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results. First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from. For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings. All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• The way I think about Diagnostic tools

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every software has issues, or as we like to call them "bugs". That is not a discussion point, just a mere fact. It follows that an important skill for developers is to be able to diagnose issues in their code. Of course we need to advance our tools and techniques so we can prevent bugs getting into the code (e.g. unit testing), but beyond designing great software, diagnosing bugs is an equally important skill. To diagnose issues, the most important assets are good techniques, skill, experience, and maybe talent. What also helps is having good diagnostic tools and what helps further is knowing all the features that they offer and how to use them. The following classification is how I like to think of diagnostics. Note that like with any attempt to bucketize anything, you run into overlapping areas and blurry lines. Nevertheless, I will continue sharing my generalizations ;-) It is important to identify at the outset if you are dealing with a performance or a correctness issue. If you have a performance issue, use a profiler. I hear people saying "I am using the debugger to debug a performance issue", and that is fine, but do know that a dedicated profiler is the tool for that job. Just because you don't need them all the time and typically they cost more plus you are not as familiar with them as you are with the debugger, doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in one and instead try to exclusively use the wrong tool for the job. Visual Studio has a profiler and a concurrency visualizer (for profiling multi-threaded apps). If you have a correctness issue, then you have several options - that's next :-) This is how I think of identifying a correctness issue Do you want a tool to find the issue for you at design time? The compiler is such a tool - it gives you an exact list of errors. Compilers now also offer warnings, which is their way of saying "this may be an error, but I am not smart enough to know for sure". There are also static analysis tools, which go a step further than the compiler in identifying issues in your code, sometimes with the aid of code annotations and other times just by pointing them at your raw source. An example is FxCop and much more in Visual Studio 11 Code Analysis. Do you want a tool to find the issue for you with code execution? Just like static tools, there are also dynamic analysis tools that instead of statically analyzing your code, they analyze what your code does dynamically at runtime. Whether you have to setup some unit tests to invoke your code at runtime, or have to manually run your app (and interact with it) under the tool, or have to use a script to execute your binary under the tool… that varies. The result is still a list of issues for you to address after the analysis is complete or a pause of the execution when the first issue is encountered. If a code path was not taken, no analysis for it will exist, obviously. An example is the GPU Race detection tool that I'll be talking about on the C++ AMP team blog. Another example is the MSR concurrency CHESS tool. Do you want you to find the issue at design time using a tool? Perform a code walkthrough on your own or with colleagues. There are code review tools that go beyond just diffing sources, and they help you with that aspect too. For example, there is a new one in Visual Studio 11 and searching with my favorite search engine yielded this article based on the Developer Preview. Do you want you to find the issue with code execution? Use a debugger - let’s break this down further next. This is how I think of debugging: There is post mortem debugging. That means your code has executed and you did something in order to examine what happened during its execution. This can vary from manual printf and other tracing statements to trace events (e.g. ETW) to taking dumps. In all cases, you are left with some artifact that you examine after the fact (after code execution) to discern what took place hoping it will help you find the bug. Learn how to debug dump files in Visual Studio. There is live debugging. I will elaborate on this in a separate post, but this is where you inspect the state of your program during its execution, and try to find what the problem is. More from me in a separate post on live debugging. There is a hybrid of live plus post-mortem debugging. This is for example what tools like IntelliTrace offer. If you are a tools vendor interested in the diagnostics space, it helps to understand where in the above classification your tool excels, where its primary strength is, so you can market it as such. Then it helps to see which of the other areas above your tool touches on, and how you can make it even better there. Finally, see what areas your tool doesn't help at all with, and evaluate whether it should or continue to stay clear. Even though the classification helps us think about this space, the reality is that the best tools are either extremely excellent in only one of this areas, or more often very good across a number of them. Another approach is to offer a toolset covering all areas, with appropriate integration and hand off points from one to the other. Anyway, with that brain dump out of the way, in follow-up posts I will dive into live debugging, and specifically live debugging in Visual Studio - stay tuned if that interests you. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Using the Static Code Analysis feature of Visual Studio (Premium/Ultimate) to find memory leakage problems

  - by terje

  Memory for managed code is handled by the garbage collector, but if you use any kind of unmanaged code, like native resources of any kind, open files, streams and window handles, your application may leak memory if these are not properly handled.  To handle such resources the classes that own these in your application should implement the IDisposable interface, and preferably implement it according to the pattern described for that interface. When you suspect a memory leak, the immediate impulse would be to start up a memory profiler and start digging into that.   However, before you follow that impulse, do a Static Code Analysis run with a ruleset tuned to finding possible memory leaks in your code.  If you get any warnings from this, fix them before you go on with the profiling. How to use a ruleset In Visual Studio 2010 (Premium and Ultimate editions) you can define your own rulesets containing a list of Static Code Analysis checks.   I have defined the memory checks as shown in the lists below as ruleset files, which can be downloaded – see bottom of this post.  When you get them, you can easily attach them to every project in your solution using the Solution Properties dialog. Right click the solution, and choose Properties at the bottom, or use the Analyze menu and choose “Configure Code Analysis for Solution”: In this dialog you can now choose the Memorycheck ruleset for every project you want to investigate.  Pressing Apply or Ok opens every project file and changes the projects code analysis ruleset to the one we have specified here. How to define your own ruleset  (skip this if you just download my predefined rulesets) If you want to define the ruleset yourself, open the properties on any project, choose Code Analysis tab near the bottom, choose any ruleset in the drop box and press Open Clear out all the rules by selecting “Source Rule Sets” in the Group By box, and unselect the box Change the Group By box to ID, and select the checks you want to include from the lists below. Note that you can change the action for each check to either warning, error or none, none being the same as unchecking the check.   Now go to the properties window and set a new name and description for your ruleset. Then save (File/Save as) the ruleset using the new name as its name, and use it for your projects as detailed above. It can also be wise to add the ruleset to your solution as a solution item. That way it’s there if you want to enable Code Analysis in some of your TFS builds.   Running the code analysis In Visual Studio 2010 you can either do your code analysis project by project using the context menu in the solution explorer and choose “Run Code Analysis”, you can define a new solution configuration, call it for example Debug (Code Analysis), in for each project here enable the Enable Code Analysis on Build   In Visual Studio Dev-11 it is all much simpler, just go to the Solution root in the Solution explorer, right click and choose “Run code analysis on solution”.     The ruleset checks The following list is the essential and critical memory checks.  CheckID Message Can be ignored ? Link to description with fix suggestions CA1001 Types that own disposable fields should be disposable No  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182172.aspx CA1049 Types that own native resources should be disposable Only if the pointers assumed to point to unmanaged resources point to something else  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182173.aspx CA1063 Implement IDisposable correctly No  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms244737.aspx CA2000 Dispose objects before losing scope No  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182289.aspx CA2115 1 Call GC.KeepAlive when using native resources See description  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182300.aspx CA2213 Disposable fields should be disposed If you are not responsible for release, of if Dispose occurs at deeper level  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182328.aspx CA2215 Dispose methods should call base class dispose Only if call to base happens at deeper calling level  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182330.aspx CA2216 Disposable types should declare a finalizer Only if type does not implement IDisposable for the purpose of releasing unmanaged resources  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182329.aspx CA2220 Finalizers should call base class finalizers No  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182341.aspx Notes: 1) Does not result in memory leak, but may cause the application to crash   The list below is a set of optional checks that may be enabled for your ruleset, because the issues these points too often happen as a result of attempting to fix up the warnings from the first set.   ID Message Type of fault Can be ignored ? Link to description with fix suggestions CA1060 Move P/invokes to NativeMethods class Security No http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182161.aspx CA1816 Call GC.SuppressFinalize correctly Performance Sometimes, see description http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182269.aspx CA1821 Remove empty finalizers Performance No http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264476.aspx CA2004 Remove calls to GC.KeepAlive Performance and maintainability Only if not technically correct to convert to SafeHandle http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182293.aspx CA2006 Use SafeHandle to encapsulate native resources Security No http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182294.aspx CA2202 Do not dispose of objects multiple times Exception (System.ObjectDisposedException) No http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182334.aspx CA2205 Use managed equivalents of Win32 API Maintainability and complexity Only if the replace doesn’t provide needed functionality http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182365.aspx CA2221 Finalizers should be protected Incorrect implementation, only possible in MSIL coding No http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182340.aspx   Downloadable ruleset definitions I have defined three rulesets, one called Inmeta.Memorycheck with the rules in the first list above, and Inmeta.Memorycheck.Optionals containing the rules in the second list, and the last one called Inmeta.Memorycheck.All containing the sum of the two first ones.  All three rulesets can be found in the  zip archive  “Inmeta.Memorycheck” downloadable from here.   Links to some other resources relevant to Static Code Analysis MSDN Magazine Article by Mickey Gousset on Static Code Analysis in VS2010 MSDN :  Analyzing Managed Code Quality by Using Code Analysis, root of the documentation for this Preventing generated code from being analyzed using attributes Online training course on Using Code Analysis with VS2010 Blogpost by Tatham Oddie on custom code analysis rules How to write custom rules, from Microsoft Code Analysis Team Blog Microsoft Code Analysis Team Blog

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• Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results)

  - by Laila

  Back in December last year, I asked myself: could it be that .NET developers think that you need three days and a PhD to do performance profiling on their code? What if developers are shunning profilers because they perceive them as too complex to use? If so, then what method do they use to measure and analyse the performance of their .NET applications? Do they even care about performance? So, a few weeks ago, I decided to get a 1-minute survey up and running in the hopes that some good, hard data would clear the matter up once and for all. I posted the survey on Simple Talk and got help from a few people to promote it. The survey consisted of 3 simple questions: Amazingly, 533 developers took the time to respond - which means I had enough data to get representative results! So before I go any further, I would like to thank all of you who contributed, because I now have some pretty good answers to the troubling questions I was asking myself. To thank you properly, I thought I would share some of the results with you. First of all, application performance is indeed important to most of you. In fact, performance is an intrinsic part of the development cycle for a good 40% of you, which is much higher than I had anticipated, I have to admit. (I know, "Have a little faith Laila!") When asked what tool you use to measure and analyse application performance, I found that nearly half of the respondents use logging statements, a third use performance counters, and 70% of respondents use a profiler of some sort (a 3rd party performance profilers, the CLR profiler or the Visual Studio profiler). The importance attributed to logging statements did surprise me a little. I am still not sure why somebody would go to the trouble of manually instrumenting code in order to measure its performance, instead of just using a profiler. I personally find the process of annotating code, calculating times from log files, and relating it all back to your source terrifyingly laborious. Not to mention that you then need to remember to turn it all off later! Even when you have logging in place throughout all your code anyway, you still have a fair amount of potentially error-prone calculation to sift through the results; in addition, you'll only get method-level rather than line-level timings, and you won't get timings from any framework or library methods you don't have source for. To top it all, we all know that bottlenecks are rarely where you would expect them to be, so you could be wasting time looking for a performance problem in the wrong place. On the other hand, profilers do all the work for you: they automatically collect the CPU and wall-clock timings, and present the results from method timing all the way down to individual lines of code. Maybe I'm missing a trick. I would love to know about the types of scenarios where you actively prefer to use logging statements. Finally, while a third of the respondents didn't have a strong opinion about code performance profilers, those who had an opinion thought that they were mainly complex to use and time consuming. Three respondents in particular summarised this perfectly: "sometimes, they are rather complex to use, adding an additional time-sink to the process of trying to resolve the existing problem". "they are simple to use, but the results are hard to understand" "Complex to find the more advanced things, easy to find some low hanging fruit". These results confirmed my suspicions: Profilers are seen to be designed for more advanced users who can use them effectively and make sense of the results. I found yet more interesting information when I started comparing samples of "developers for whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle", with those "to whom performance is only looked at in times of crisis", and "developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works". See the three graphs below. Sample of developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle: Sample of developers to whom performance is important only in times of crisis: Sample of developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works: As you can see, there is a strong correlation between the usage of a profiler and the importance attributed to performance: indeed, the more important performance is to a development team, the more likely they are to use a profiler. In addition, developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle have a higher tendency to use a much wider range of methods for performance measurement and analysis. And, unsurprisingly, the less important performance is, the less varied the methods of measurement are. So all in all, to come back to my random questions: .NET developers do care about performance. Those who care the most use a wider range of performance measurement methods than those who care less. But overall, logging statements, performance counters and third party performance profilers are the performance measurement methods of choice for most developers. Finally, although most of you find code profilers complex to use, those of you who care the most about performance tend to use profilers more than those of you to whom performance is not so important.

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