Java Performance: Beyond Witchcraft, Pseudoscience, and Folklore

In this full-day workshop, Ben Evans (IBM, formerly Red Hat, New Relic, JClarity, DB, MS) digs deep to explain why software performance (especially in Java) is such a complex topic and is still regarded as something of a Dark Art, even after all these years. We'll discuss the roots of the complexity and explain why many simple, reductionist mental models fail to adequately describe the true nature of performance.

As well as mental models and methodology, we'll meet a wealth of examples derived from real performance tuning engagements. From these case studies, we'll present a roadmap of how to do performance testing you can trust - repeatable and dependable experiments that you can have confidence in. We'll also discuss some of the major topics in modern performance - in particular Profiling, and how Observability techniques dovetail with performance engineering.

Our examples and exercises are all in Java, but many of the techniques are language-independent and the workshop should be accessible to a wide range of Devops and other engineers without specific in-depth Java knowledge.