Profiling with Netbeans: Do You Have a Memory Leak?
February 23, 2008
This article on Netbeans.org discusses using the profiler bundled with the Netbeans IDE to detect memory leaks. By monitoring the surviving generations metric, one can supposedly catch a leak. I believe that this article ignores a certain situation.
New Hard Drive Woes for the Dell Dimension
February 11, 2008
As described in my earlier post, I managed to get my hand-me-down Dell Dimension 8400 desktop working after a little tinkering and a lot of reading. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and was up and running for a good week.
But, alas, my poor computer was destined for yet another crippling problem. One evening as I read the news, the cpu usage maxed out, and the computer was unresponsive. I believe Firefox was the only application open. Regardless, it was under a very light load.
After turning the computer off, I waited a few seconds, and then pushed the power button. Instead of booting from my Ubuntu partition, Grub presented me with a command line. I tried manually booting from the hard drive with no luck.
ConcurrentHashMap to the Rescue
February 2, 2008
It was only a matter of time before I needed a Thread-safe Map. Looking at the synchronization wrappers for the Java Collections framework, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. The wrapper classes provide external synchronization on the entire Collection. That means that any read or update method is locking — one thing in at a time. What a performance bottleneck!
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