Java Magazine, July/August 2018
ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JULY AUGUST 2018 08 Books on Java performance are few and far between From top publishers we have Scott Oaks Java Performance OReilly 2014 as well as Java Performance Companion Addison Wesley 2016 by multiple authors which I reviewed in the September October 2016 issue The latter book was a descent into the workings of the G1 garbage collector and the Java Serviceability Agent Optimizing Java is like the Oaks book in that it is an exhaustive explanation of the workings of the JVM with a principal focus on the HotSpot implementation and OpenJDK based variants The authors start with explanations of what performance is how its measured and the terminology used to refer to different aspects of performance A quick overview of the JVM is then followed by a detailed discussion of hardware This is necessary because at numerous points in the rest of the book the authors refer to concepts that are explained in this hardware section the CPU I O memory paging and other aspects of todays systems I admire the decision to anchor future discussions in the hardware rather than generalizing in the abstract The book takes one additional step in preparing the reader for the forthcoming analysis a detailed examination of how to run benchmarks primarily using the Java Microbenchmark Harness and how to understand the results obtained The next three chapters are deep dives into the garbage collection GC including an excellent technical overview of GC in general followed by analysis of how G1 and the parallel GC work in the present JVM There follows a chapter on logging GC performance and only then suggestions for how to tune the garbage collector for specific loads and execution situations By the time you get to the tuning advice you are fully capable of understanding the principles behind the suggestions The next four chapters explore how the JVM executes code Authors Evans and Newland have been writing about code execution for this magazine for the last several issues If you like their lucid explanations youll love these chapters Theyre nitty gritty nerd stim and highly readable Then come two chapters on concurrency and parallel execution one chapter on logging and efficient message processing and one on profiling A final section discusses the changes wrought by Java 9 and their efects on the previous material Optimizing Java is one of the most informative explanations of the internals of the JVM Even if youre not looking to solve a performance problem youll benefit from reading it And if you believe as I do that good programmers become better by knowing how exactly their code is executed then you owe it to yourself to read this excellent volume Andrew Binstock java books OPTIMIZING JAVA By Ben Evans James Gough and Chris Newland
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