A presentation by Attila Szegedi titled "Everything I Ever Learned about JVM Performance Tuning @twitter" has been floating around for a few months. I've restructured much of the content into a set of notes. This covers the basics of memory allocation and garbage collection in Java, the different garbage collectors available in HotSpot and how they can be tuned, and finally some anecdotes from Attila's experiences at Twitter.

I'm still fuzzy on some things, so it's not ground truth. If more experienced people weigh in, I'll fix things up. The very informative hour-long presentation is still highly recommended.

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I like to take some time every once in a while to think about what I've done that I'm proud of, what I've learned, and what I want to do. With the beginning of a new year comes the perfect opportunity to reflect on my life in the year past.

I've split it into two separate blog posts, one professional (meaning research and grad school life) and one personal (meaning hobbies, self-improvement, life goals). This post covers the latter; my personal life in 2011.

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I like to take some time every once in a while to think about what I've done that I'm proud of, what I've learned, and what I want to do. With the beginning of a new year comes the perfect opportunity to reflect on my life in the year past.

I've split it into two separate blog posts, one professional (meaning research and grad school life) and one personal (meaning hobbies, self-improvement, life goals). This post covers the former; my life as a grad student in 2011.

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This is a review of Facebook's Haystack storage system, used to store the staggering amount of photos that are uploaded to Facebook everyday. Facebook Photos started out with an NFS appliance, but was forced to move to a custom solution for the reasons of cost, scale, and performance. Haystack is an engineering solution that applies well-known techniques from GFS and log-structured filesystems to their distributed, append-only, key-value blob situation. Metadata management is somewhat novel, as well as their CDN integration.

The paper, "Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook's photo storage" by Beaver et al., was published at OSDI '10.

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