• Interview on the Disributed Podcast

  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.

  Read More »

• Firefox 10.0.1 – MPROTECT strikes again!

  It’s been a while and Firefox has moved from version 5 to version 10.0.1, now that’s a pace! 😉 But the important bits are…enforcing MPROTECT has never been easier…well, almost. 😉 Thanks to this attachment in this bug, the latest version of Firefox compiles fine on hardened profiles (or simply on grsec kernels). In order […]

  Read More »

• Speaking at QCon London

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

  Read More »

• Slides From Recent Presentations

  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: Devoxx (Payment required)

  Read More »

• Adding Latency and Limiting Bandwidth

  Some aspects of linux have the reputation of being hard. Traffic control via queueing disciplines for bandwidth management for example. Even the title is enough to strike fear into the heart of a seasoned system admin. Which is a pity really, as the things outlined in chapter 9 of the lartc are very useful in […]

  Read More »

• Diagnosing a Drupal 7 cache generation problem

  My company launched their new website recently. When we launched before Christmas we encountered a reoccurring problem that was more difficult than most to diagnose. The problem itself is very specific to our site so I doubt the exact details will help…

  Read More »

• removing empty cgroups and other problems

  We had to clean up some left over cgroups after another set of experiments with LXC.The guys doing it encountered problems, as the logic is the opposite of what you expect from your experience on a normal unix filesystem. Specifically the problem happens when you have a nested cgroup – for example /cgroup/foo/bar/ The problem happens […]

  Read More »

• Building a CPU Topology on MacOS X

  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 cores and […]

  Read More »

• Concurrent Sequencing

  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 It appears under heavy contention with fewer available cores than busy threads the Disruptor can perform terribly. After a bit of investigation I managed […]

  Read More »

• More Complexity and Fork/Join

  Firstly an apology.  On my previous blog, I mentioned that a string splitting algorithm implemented in Scala had a complexity of O(n2)O(n^2).  One commenter mentioned that they did not understand how I came to that calculation.  I though I should revisit my guess work and actually do a more thorough analysis.  What I found was interesting, […]

  Read More »

Previous Posts Next posts