Where Aeron catches up on the goss. The Need For Naming A few months ago a pull request appeared on Aeron's Github site that added the ability to request Aeron to resolve or re-resolve host names to IP addresses.  In cloud environments, especially when using Kubernetes, when nodes fail and restart i...

One of my more recent projects has led me to become more involved in the Aeron project.  If you are unaware of Aeron, then head over to the Github site and check it out.  At its core is an reliable messaging system that works over UDP, Multicast UDP and IPC.  It also contains an archiving feature fo...

If you have been a long time follower of my blog you will have noticed that is has been a really long time since I posted any new content.  Since my last post six years ago at lot has changed.  I no longer work at LMAX an have started out as an independent consultant.  If you are part of an organisa...

While preparing for my talk at QCon SF 2014, I wanted to investigate a theory around how micro-benchmarks are not a useful reflection of how software may behave when run as part of a larger application.  Specifically due contention in the last-level cache (L3* in current Intel CPUs). Read more »

I'll be giving some talks over the next few months: 8 Oct: Auckland Software Craftsmanship - 6 Years of test automation. 16 Oct: Auckland JVM Group - Stuff I learned about performance. 5 Nov: QCon San Francisco 2014 - Stuff I learned about performance.

My talk on the Disruptor at YOW! 2013 is now available at the YOW! Eventer site.

If, like me, you prefer to run the Oracle version of Java on your Linux machine as the default JDK, you will often find that the Linux distro will have other ideas.  Fedora for example has a number of Java based applications as part of the distribution which will include a dependency on the OpenJDK....

Recently on InfoQ, Aliaksei Papou posted an article on some of his experiments with high performance interchange of messages between threads.  There were a number of examples within the article, but I am going to focus on the multi-producer case.  One of the optimisations that the article showed was...

I recently upgraded my personal workstation from Ubuntu 12.04 to Fedora Core 19.  I'm very happy with the change, I prefer the standard Gnome 3 to Canonical's Unity desktop.  Probably something to do with my workstation not being a tablet.  However, one of the annoyances with Fedora Core has always ...

I've decided that I'm a bit bored of the whole putting a beta tag on various versions of the Disruptor so I've decide to send forth Disruptor 3.0.0 into the world. The big challenges of this release were to clean up the code and come up with a better algorithm for handling multiple producers. If I w...

I'm happy to announce that I will speaking at Tech Mesh in December. I'll be speaking about the Disruptor from two perspectives, firstly looking briefly back at some of the history and motivations behind the Disruptor. Then spending some time explaining at the challenges of building high performance...

Last week I gave a talk on non-blocking concurrency at JAX London. Here are the slides: The video is also available

During a recent conversation on the LJC mailing list around a proposal for adding a library to the JDK that would add support for handling integer overflow a question arose. Would the JVM be able to optimise this code to make efficient use of the hardware support for overflow detection if this funct...

I've be working sporadically on the next major revision of the Disruptor, but still making steady progress. I've merged my experimental branch into the main line and I'm working on ensure comprehensive test coverage and re-implement the Disruptor DSL. As a matter of course I've been running performa...

The Disruptor version 2.10 has been released. It is available from the Google Code download page and has been submitted to Maven central. Changes Remove deprecated timeout methods. Added OSGI metadata to jar file. Removed PaddedAtomicLong and use Sequence in all places. Fix various generics warnings...

Last month the guys from the Distributed Podcast interviewed me about LMAX and the Disruptor. Many thanks to Jonathan and Rinat, I had a great time.

Along with Martin Thompson, I'm speaking about non-blocking concurrency at QCon London in March.

My slides from JAX London - Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency: Beginners guide-concurrency View more presentations from Michael Barker Video: LJC@Playfish, JAX London My slides from Devoxx - Disruptor Tools In Action: Disruptor tools in action View more presentations from Michael Barker Video...

Within a project I've been working on I've had the need to simulate the capabilities of Linux's /proc/cpuinfo on Mac OS. Specifically I needed to build a topology of the CPUs on a given system. I.e. I need to map the operating system's processors to hardware threads, then build a picture of which co...

A few weeks ago one of the users of the Disruptor posted some worrying benchmarks: ThreePublisherToOneProcessorSequencedThroughputTest run 0: BlockingQueue=645,161 Disruptor=1,772 ops/sec run 1: BlockingQueue=1,250,000 Disruptor=20,000,000 ops/sec run 2: BlockingQueue=1,250,000 Disruptor=56 ops/sec ...

I've decided to rename my blog.  I plan to focus my blog efforts more on concurrency than any other particular subject and I thought it would be fun to pay homage to the bad science blog by Ben Goldacre. It will probably kill my traffic for a while, until I get the few blog aggregators that carry my...

I've had a few speaking events confirmed for the end of this year: Trisha Gee and I are speaking at JAX London on November 2nd. I'm presenting the disruptor in a half hour "Tools in Action" slot at Devoxx 2011 on November 14th. I'm speaking on Technology and Performance Folklore at StackOverflow Dev...

Ever wanted to know what flags could be set and their default values for the Hotspot VM?  Try this: java -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal

Being someone who's interested in Open Source and very focused on performance, I've been looking at the Java & the JVM and wondering about what I would most like to see added.  IMHO one of the fundamental missing pieces is support for complex stack allocated types.  This is not a new idea.  C# calls...

The Disruptor, the design pattern at the core of the financial exchange I'm helping build at LMAX has been open sourced.  If you've seen the presentation that Martin Thompson and I gave at QCon or the one I did for the LJC @Skillsmatter, this is the ring-buffer based code that we've been banging on ...