Standing in the Field @ Valley Forge

Standing in the Field

Notes from SJS Application Server Field Engineering

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Thursday April 28, 2005
Platform Edition benchmark

Lots of people are familiar with the Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition as the J2EE server they downloaded as part of the J2EE SDK. But I bet a lot of those people don't realize that you can use that application server in production for free.

Sun has now published some impressive SPEC benchmarks for SJS Application Server Platform Edition. I can't wait to see the price/performance numbers for this configuration. With a free application server and the price/performance of the V20Z Opteron servers it's going to be very impressive.

Thanks to Rich for both the original link and for all of the work he and his product team have done to make this possible.

(2005-04-28 21:33:50.0) Permalink


Friday April 22, 2005
Skeletons on your hard drive / Selling your Mac

News.com had an article recently about how many PC users do a bad job of wiping their hard drive before selling, donating, or trashing their PC. Obviously this is a bad thing considering the sensitive information the average person keeps on their PC.

I understand why this is difficult for the average PC user. Wiping a hard drive is a tedious process for a PC. Properly wiping a hard drive is very easy on a Mac, however. If you are planning on selling or giving away your Mac, here are some easy steps,/p>

Things you will need:

Steps to permanently erase the hard drive of an old Mac.

  1. Take one last look at the files on your old Mac to make sure there are no data files you still need. The whole point of this process is to delete the data permanently and there will be no way to recover the data after we are finished.
  2. Connect the two Macs using the FireWire cable.
  3. Reboot the old Mac into FireWire target mode. To do this, reboot the old Mac while holding the "T" key.
  4. Open the Disk Utility on the new Mac. You will see the hard drive of the old Mac shown as a FireWire connected volume.
  5. Select the FireWire volume representing your old Mac. (Not the hard drive disk, but the volume with the FireWire icon.) There should be five tabs on the right side of the screen when you do this. (First aid, erase, partition, RAID, restore)
  6. Select the erase tab.
  7. Select the options... button on the bottom right of the window.
  8. Check "8 Way Random write Format" and then OK
  9. Select to the erase button on the bottom right of the window.
  10. One last chance to back out. Make sure absolutely sure you have the right volume selected and that you no longer need the data on the old Mac. Once you are absolutely sure, select Erase to begin the process of wiping the old drive.
  11. Wait. This is not a quick process: you are completely erasing every part of the old hard drive multiple times. You can continue to use the new Mac while the old Mac is erased, but the process will take a long time. Typically overnight or longer: don't put off erasing the disk until the last minute.

Nothing really too much different than a PC, but the built-in secure disk overwrite and firewire target mode makes it much more convenient on a Mac.

(2005-04-22 10:10:34.0) Permalink


Wednesday April 20, 2005
DTrace and Java

Severalpeople have blogged this new java.net project that is a DTrace agent for Java. Since I've talked about DTrace and Java previously I figured that I should throw in my two cents. (Especially since I've been less than diligent in posting recently.) This project is very interesting and I'm hoping that it will be available as part of the standard JDK in the future. Most interestly, it has several probes that are going to allow DTrace to instrument method calls and GC events.

But it's important for me to note that you can already use DTrace to probe Java applications. Most notably jstack() does a reasonably good job of translating stacks into Java method names. Don't assume that you need this module to use DTrace effectively on a Java application. The new module does allow you to be more proactive and has some very useful trace points for doing active troubleshooting, but don't discount the out of the box DTrace functionality.

Also, the downside of this module is that it has to be actively installed into the JVM. Which takes away one of the advantages of DTrace: the fact that it is pre-integrated into the OS.

It is great to see this module. And it's especially great to see this as a java.net project with CDDL licensed source code. But it's probably best to just see this as a technology preview for what we will see as far as DTrace integration in Mustang.

(2005-04-20 11:18:57.0) Permalink


Tuesday April 05, 2005
Performance Tuning Guide Doc Review

One of my projects this month is to review the Sun Java System Application Server Performance Tuning Guide. This is part of a combined effort between the field and the product team to review the complete documentation set.

It's interesting work. I've always found this document helpful but sitting down and reviewing it page by page has been a much different experience. There are a lot of places I'd make it more concise or differently organized.

So, take a look at the Perf Guide with me. I'll include any comments and feedback with my own review for the documentation team.

(2005-04-05 21:31:38.0) Permalink Comments [1]