Quick GC Histograms

Some times its hard to find a way of explaining to the technically less literate the power that the Unix shell hands you. The original ideas behing the combination wordprocessor and programmers work bench combined with the power of pipes make text processing easy.

 So to today's problem - analysing GC logs for latency spikes. As we run the jvm with the following properties; 

-XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCApplicationStoppedTime \
-XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -Xloggc:/path/to/gc.logfile

Wedding & Whale Sharks

A week ago Rhoda and I got married. It came together very smoothly, mainly down to Rhoda’s phenomenal organisational skills, as well as the wedding planner we hired – (W.E.D.). That by itself would be more than enough - but to top it off we also took a couple of side trips with our friends.

Agile Operations

I promised matt carter I'd start writing up aspects of how we run agile operations (aka devops) at LMAX. Apologies this is so overdue.

One of the major tensions in any small techical operations team is the tension between project work and "interrupt driven" work. Interrupt work is hard to define, other than the slightly circular "being anything that is not project work". In practise this ranges from problems in production through to getting users working mice.

Small IT teams are usually pretty bad at dealing with interruptions, so we've developed the concept of an "Interruption Monkey" to keep things manageable.