Thursday May 18, 2006
Thursday May 18, 2006 This years JavaOne has been an absolute whirlwind. It's usually not that big a Solaris event but this year the requests for interviews from the media and analysts have been somewhat overwhelming so I haven't been able to get on to the show floor as much as I'd like. The good news is that, as of last night, we'd DTraced 5 apps and hadn't had to give away any iPods. Interestingly we have doubled the performance of one application and reduced the startup time on another by almost 70%.
Traffic hasn't been as high as last year but we can probably attribute that to the fact that Adam wasn't on stage shilling for us like he was last year.
More later....
Friday May 12, 2006 It's back! After last years successful run we will once again issue the Solaris Performance Challenge at JavaOne. If you are coming to JavaOne next week, you can enter to receive a performance improvement for your Java application, otherwise you'll get an iPod or a Sony PSP.
If you‘re a developer coming to JavaOne this year, visit the Solaris pods (#737 and #739) at the Sun booth to check out what the most advanced operating system on the planet has to offer.
Bring us your Java™ applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) and we‘ll use Solaris 10 to improve their performance. If we can‘t find any additional performance gains for your app, you‘ll win a cool prize such as an iPod or a Sony PSP.
Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications, “Hello World” and benchmarks don‘t really count, the basic rules are: 1) This applies to real-world applications which serve a useful purpose in a production environment only. 2) Your application must contain at least 2,000 lines of *code*. 3) Your application should run with JVM 1.5 or later. 4) If your application runs in an application server, it must be the latest version of Sun Java System Application Server, BEA Weblogic, or IBM WebSphere. If your app doesn't meet these requirements, come over anyway, we‘ll take a shot at it but if we don‘t get an improvement, you don‘t get a prize.
The Legal Stuff™ Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.
Last year, we worked on 16 applications with *15* of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280% so it's worth a look.
Thursday June 30, 2005 As of last night when the Pavillion at JavaOne closed, we had DTraced 16 applications with 15 of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280%.
To put this achievement in perspective you really had to be there, some of the challenges we faced were: 1)We had one person doing 95% of the work, including installing the apps, getting them running and doing the DTracing. 2)The pavillion was only open for ~8 hours every day. 3)None of the Sun people involved were Java experts. 4)The majority of the apps had never been run on Solaris before. 5)The booth right next to us subscribed to the "employ an idiot with a loudspeaker to shout about your product once every ten minutes" school of marketing (this might not sound too bad, but after 2 days it starts to get very annoying).
The good news is we had a lot of happy customers and got to show off DTrace in the best possible way - solving real world applications. The applications themselves were surprisingly diverse, everything from a CDMA network interference modeling app to an XML parser and something that was representative of a military app (the customer wasn't allowed to talk about that one).
It was great to see and hear so many Java developers asking about Solaris 10, we handed out literally hundreds of Solaris 10 DVD's and the latest reports from the DTrace presentation going on today indicate that there were more than 900 people in attendance. That's over 10% of the total attendees at JavaOne this year.
Tuesday June 28, 2005 We're about halfway through day 2 at JavaOne and we've had to give away an iPod, however, we have 9 performance wins and a queue of customers waiting to have their applications DTraced.
We had a minor debate about whether the application that didn't get enhanced within the alloted time actually met the rules but we decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. If you're interested it was a 227 line (including comments) Java app.
JavaOne Update - Solaris 5, iPods 0
The Solaris Challenge got off to a great start at JavaOne on Monday with the main session of the day where Johnnyl and Adam showed off the fact that we can now DTrace Java applications with Solaris 10.
Adam was just coming off the stage when he was approached by the first challenger of the day, a customer interested in using DTrace on Java midlets provided to him by third parties (more on that later in the week).
The action for the rest of the day happened at booth #800 on the Sun stand with DTrace commando Jarod (occasionally assisted by Brian, Adam and at one point, Scott McNealy) happily DTracing multiple applications and giving DTrace demos.
They said we were crazy, they said it couldn't be done but we've been through 5 applications today and haven't had to hand over any iPods yet, although one customer has pointed out that he felt he should get one as we only delivered a 30% improvement for him (with no major code changes).
We'll be posting live from the show floor tomorrow and will write up more of the gory details then.
Thursday June 23, 2005 If you want to try and win an iPod at JavaOne, take the Solaris 10 Challenge.
Free iPod/iShuffle Instructions 1. Visit the Solaris pod (#800) in the Sun booth. 2. Bring us your Java(TM) applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) 3. Sit and watch us DTrace it, this may take up to 1 hour, (or go and race a Sun Executive or fellow JavaOne attendee on the Virtual Streets of San Francisco - We have a rather large video game system on hand) 4. Get a performance improvement or an iPod/iShuffle 5. Do your happy dance (this step is entirely optional)
Note: Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications (i.e. a few hundred lines of code), "Hello World" and benchmarks don't really count (we'll take a shot at them but if we don't get an improvement, you don't get a prize) and we may need to see your source code in order to recommend changes.
The Legal Stuff (TM) Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.
Thursday June 16, 2005 Further to my posting earlier in the week, we now have more details on the Solaris 10 Challenge at JavaOne.
If you're a developer coming to JavaOne this year, visit the Solaris pod (#800) at the Sun booth to check out what the most advanced operating system on the planet has to offer.
Bring us your Java(TM) applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) and we'll use DTrace (yes, DTrace now has Java VM agents) to improve their performance. If we can't find any additional performance gains for your app, you'll win a cool prize such as an iPod or an iShuffle. It's really that simple.
Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications, "Hello World" and benchmarks don't really count (we'll take a shot at them but if we don't get an improvement, you don't get a prize).
While your apps are being DTrace'd, you can take the opportunity to race a Sun Executive or fellow JavaOne attendee on the Virtual Streets of San Francisco in 2049. Yep, come by the JavaOne Playground to show off your driving skills - you might get to race Scott McNealy, Mary Mary or even Duke!
The Legal Stuff (TM) Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.