Douglas Hawkins

Concurrency Concepts in Java

9:00 AM MDT

Unlike earlier languages, Java had a well-defined threading and memory model from the beginning. And over the years, Java gained new packages to help solve concurrency problems.

Despite this, Java concurrency is sometimes subtle and fraught with peril.

In this talk, you'll learn these subtleties. And finally, you'll learn how to handle concurrency by exploring the concepts behind java.util.concurrent and other concurrency libraries.

How (Not) To Measure and Profile Java Performance

11:00 AM MDT

Today, we all benefit from the sophistication of modern compilers and hardware, but that extra complexity can also make it difficult to reason about performance.

In this talk, we'll examine some surprising performance cases and learn how to
use profiling and benchmarking tools to better understand our modern execution environments.

Java Optimizations That Matter (and Some That Don't)

1:30 PM MDT

Early releases of Java performed poorly, but those issues largely disappeared long ago with the introduction of HotSpot. However, much of the performance advice for Java persists through hearsay from those early days.

In this talk, we'll forget the hearsay and take an objective look using benchmarking and profiling tools to find out which optimizations matter today and just as importantly those that don't.

Architecting with Garbage Collection in Mind

3:15 PM MDT

HotSpot provides a variety of garbage collectors with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To get the most out of our applications, we need to pick the right garbage collector and design to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its
weaknesses.

In this presentation, you'll learn about criteria for picking a garbage collector, how to measure GC performance, and how to write code that works with rather than against the GC.

How HotSpot Sees Your Code

5:00 PM MDT

Just as a database creates an execution plan to run your SQL queries, HotSpot analyzes your Java code to determine how to best to run your code. And just as with a database where understanding indexes is important to achieving performance, there are a few core concepts that important to understanding Java performance.

In this talk, we'll explore the way HotSpot examines a piece of code in detail, learning not just about the optimizations that HotSpot performs but the hazards that get in its way. In the end, you'll learn how to work with HotSpot so you can write faster code with less effort.