Finally, OpenSolaris.org goes live

Today we can only download the source to DTrace, but there is a hint of things to come from the home page; "Soon, you'll be able to download the OpenSolaris distribution.". With the OpenSolaris release we are finally seeing Sun developers blogging source code - Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill are just two examples. Calvin Austin's recent leaving sun blog entry hinted at problems within Sun with regards to blogging source code - which is a shame since the Java 5.0 source has been available for some time. Hopefully soon we might actually being to see more JVM Sun bloggers in the same calibre as Adam and Bryan, together with a blogroll of JVM developers equivalent to the Solaris Kernal Developers.

Solaris Internal Links

• Load Averages Explained
• Performance Analysis and Monitoring Using Hardware Counters
• prstat
• Solaris Internals and slides
• Hows to check your box is running 64-bit: isainfo -kv
• Check Solaris patch levels: showrev -p
  
• LWP
• Managing Thread Execution and Wait Times
  

A Comparative Study of Persistence Mechanisms

An interesting article from Sun Labs. If anything, the conclusion is worth a read.

"Acceptable EJB performance seems unattainable at present unless dramatic changes are made to the application object model to avoid fine-grain objects when mapped to EJB. While this approach is now reflected in standard design patterns for EJB, the extra effort that it implies is disturbing from the overall application design perspective. In contrast, JDO manages to achieve reasonable performance at much lower impact on application design, while remaining agnostic to the nature of the external data store. Therefore, at this time, JDO would seem to offer the best overall persistence mechanism for demanding, object-oriented, applications. Note, however, that at the time of writing, a new specification for entity bean persistence [Sun04] was being proposed for EJB 3.0 that would bring it much closer to JDO in spirit."

MythTV

Now this looks cool. All I need to do is fine time to install it on my Linux box.

New Year, New Threading Model

Actually its the Alternative threading model (T2) on Solaris 8. Over the Christmas period we finally tested our application with Solaris's alternative threading model. Overall we are seeing a 30% improvement in performance, with a 3x reduction in context switch activity, system CPU usage is also down.

To answer the question of why did it take us so long to move to T2 - well I currently working on a project for a large corporation, and they have only just moved our production hardware from Solaris 6 to Solaris 8.