(Some) Java apps run faster on fewer cores...

From Paul Tyma: Mailinator(tm) Blog: How I sped up my server by a factor of 6

Odd effects of reducing #cores for the JVM to improve message throughput.

ActiveMQ Advisories and STOMP

Advisory Messages in ActiveMQ are pretty useful, but since I mostly use STOMP clients I never really knew how useful !  I was blocked by this so prompted by a mail from Gary Tully on the activemq-users list and a long weekend coming up I sat down and tried to work out just what was needed.  In the end, after a brief diversion into why JmsFrameTranslator isn't actually used in the server, I got a pretty simple implementation up and running.  This was aided by XStream already being a dependency and it having pretty good JSON support.  Some tests later and I have a first implementation.

The internal openwire DataStructure objects are now marshalled into the STOMP message body as JSON.  An example Advosiry sent to /topic/ActiveMQ.Advisory.Consumer.Queue.>:

{"ConsumerInfo": {
"commandId": 4,
"responseRequired": true,
"consumerId": {
"connectionId": "ID:pb-d-128-141-235-87.cern.ch-52535-1274794978077-4:1",
"sessionId": 1,
"value": 1
},
"destination": {
"@class": "ActiveMQQueue",
"string": "testConsumerAdvisory",
"null": {}
},
"prefetchSize": 1000,
"maximumPendingMessageLimit": 0,
"browser": false,
"dispatchAsync": true,
"noLocal": false,
"exclusive": false,
"retroactive": false,
"priority": 0,
"optimizedAcknowledge": false,
"noRangeAcks": false
}}


The code supports automatically supports all command objects that could be marshalled. One little problem is how the "destination" object is marshalled. Not sure why we get the @class in there.

Producing RPMs for Apache ActiveMQ

Edit (11-01-21) : See the more recent post on a new YUM repo and ActiveMQ 5.4.2 rpms.

All of the deployment we do is via RPM and a big gap for us has long been the lack of RPMs for FUSE Message Broker/ Apache ActiveMQ.

We've had our own hand-rolled rpms for a while now, and when I saw Dejan working on rpms via the maven plugin for ActiveMQ I offered to submit upstream what we have.  It's taken a bit of time to clean it up, but now it's all ready.

Our main deployment platform is Scientific Linux 5, based on RHEL 5.  We try where possible to submit things upstream via EPEL, and this means we need to comply with the Fedora packaging guidelines.  For Java you must build from source and you can't package dependencies in your rpm, so for a 'real' ActiveMQ rpm I'm going to have to build all the dependencies (and that includes all the camel dependencies too).  For such an old OS versions as RHEL5 I think this isn't worth it, but it's on my project list to try and do this for the upcoming RHEL6 release.

Anyway, what does this mean for ActiveMQ rpms now ?  Basically they're 'built' from a binary tarball coming from the Apache dist web server.  The rpm does some repackaging to make things a bit more linux-like in terms of directory locations and also applies some small patches (AMQ-2726 , AMQ-2727) which I'm waiting to get integrated upstream.

Everything is released for now on github and I hope it gets merged upstream at some point - keep an eye on this bug (AMQ-2105) for progress.  If you want to build for yourself, just grab the code and do a make

Built rpms for Centos5/RHEL5/SLC5 are on our build system.  Enjoy !

India & Nepal

I spend 3 weeks this January in Northern India and Nepal, starting in Delhi, going to Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Kushinagar and Lumbini finishing up in Nepal in Kathmandu.  Too few days really, but definitely gave me a taste for the area.  Here's some pictures (flickr).

Orderly JSON

From Simon Willison:

Orderly JSON. Essentially the JSON equivalent of RelaxNG’s compact syntax—a pleasant mini-language for describing JSON objects which compiles to the more verbose JSONSchema format.

Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation, not the whole thing

Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation, not the whole thing

More details from John Allspaw (flickr ops manager) on how toget dev + ops working together. All nice stuff like better monitoring, allowing developers to easily add monitoring, feature flags and more.

check it out.

New job positions in Europe for Amazon Web Services

New job positions in Europe for Amazon Web Services
Interesting jobs @AWS including Solutions Architect and Tech Evangelist.