Simple Binary Encoding

Financial systems communicate by sending and receiving vast numbers of messages in many different formats. When people use terms like…

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Java Garbage Collection Distilled

Serial, Parallel, Concurrent, CMS, G1, Young Gen, New Gen, Old Gen, Perm Gen, Eden, Tenured, Survivor Spaces, Safepoints, and the…

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Printing Generated Assembly Code From The Hotspot JIT Compiler

Sometimes when profiling a Java application it is necessary to understand the assembly code generated by the Hotspot JIT compiler.…

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CPU Cache Flushing Fallacy

Even from highly experienced technologists I often hear talk about how certain operations cause a CPU cache to ‘flush’. This…

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Compact Off-Heap Structures/Tuples In Java

In my last post I detailed the implications of the access patterns your code takes to main memory. Since then…

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Modelling Is Everything

I’m often asked, “What is the best way to learn about building high-performance systems”? There are many perfectly valid answers…

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Memory Access Patterns Are Important

In high-performance computing it is often said that the cost of a cache-miss is the largest performance penalty for an…

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Single Writer Principle

When trying to build a highly scalable system the single biggest limitation on scalability is having multiple writers contend for…

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Smart Batching

How often have we all heard that “batching” will increase latency? As someone with a passion for low-latency systems this…

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