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Showing posts from April, 2013

This Blog Has Moved!

Right, so yes, five years ago I moved to github pages, and never bothered to redirect any of these pages there. Now I've moved on from there, and... Finally I am using my real domain, trishagee.com . My blog is now at trishagee.com/blog .  See you there!
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How Mechanical Sympathy got me to the airport on time

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Lets talk about mechanical sympathy.  Martin Thompson has been making this term very popular in software development, so it's best to read his description of why he used the term . I had a perfect example yesterday.  I'm about to drive to the airport and the car won't move (I'm a modern tomboy, I can write  stories about hair  and stories about cars). Not at all.  It's stuck.  I can't reverse out of my parking space. The first thing that occurs to me is something is stuck under the car.  Like a cat.  Those buggers hide in the stupidest of places.  So I get out and check there's nothing wedged against the wheels, which seems like the most logical thing that would stop the car moving. (OK that's not true.  The first thing that occurs to me is oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-miss-my-plane-and-I-haven't-got-a-backup-plan-to-get-to-the-airport-and-I've-already-paid-for-parking-and-I-would-like-to-cry-now-but-that's-not-going-to-
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Devoxx UK 2013

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Last week was the first Devoxx UK, bringing the brand from Belgium and, more recently, France.  And I think it was a HUGE success. Of course, disclaimers first - I was on the programme committee, so I might say that the whole thing was awesome.  Although in all honesty, even being slightly involved in the organisation of a conference is a lot of work, and you can't wait to see the back of it (and I didn't do half as much as some people).  Note to self - never speak at a conference you're on the programme committee for, it's too much work. As a speaker and attendee though, Devoxx was really brilliant - great speakers, interesting content, awesome friendly atmosphere, good venue, parties with free drink and good opportunities to speak to people.  There were downsides: limited coffee availability, no free croissants, um... I'm really struggling to think of anything else, and none of those are show-stoppers (especially when the venue is in Islington, so you can
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Dissecting the Disruptor: What's so special about a ring buffer?

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Recently we open sourced the LMAX Disruptor , the key to what makes our exchange so fast.  Why did we open source it?  Well, we've realised that conventional wisdom around high performance programming is... a bit wrong. We've come up with a better, faster way to share data between threads, and it would be selfish not to share it with the world.  Plus it makes us look dead clever. On the site you can download a technical article explaining what the Disruptor is and why it's so clever and fast.  I even get a writing credit on it, which is gratifying when all I really did is insert commas and re-phrase sentences I didn't understand. However I find the whole thing a bit much to digest all at once, so I'm going to explain it in smaller pieces, as suits my  NADD audience. First up - the ring buffer.  Initially I was under the impression the Disruptor was just the ring buffer.  But I've come to realise that while this data structure is at the heart of the patte
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Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

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This is the missing piece in the end-to-end view of the Disruptor.  Brace yourselves, it's quite long.  But I decided to keep it in a single blog so you could have the context in one place. The important areas are: not wrapping the ring; informing the consumers; batching for producers; and how multiple producers work. ProducerBarriers The Disruptor code has interfaces and helper classes for the Consumer s, but there's no interface for your producer, the thing that writes to the ring buffer.  That's because nothing else needs to access your producer, only you need to know about it.  However, like the consuming side, a ProducerBarrier is created by the ring buffer and your producer will use this to write to it. Writing to the ring buffer involves a two-phase commit.  First, your producer has to claim the next slot on the buffer.  Then, when the producer has finished writing to the slot, it will call commit on the ProducerBarrier . So let's look at the first bi
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Dissecting the Disruptor: How do I read from the ring buffer?

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The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX . After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are.  Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you're using the Disruptor. ConsumerBarriers and Consumers I'm going to approach this slightly backwards, because it's probably easier to understand in the long run.  Assuming that some magic has populated it: how do you read something from the ring buffer? (OK, I'm starting to regret using Paint/ Gimp .  Although it's an excellent excuse to purchase a graphics tablet if I do continue down this road.  Also UML gurus are probably cursing my name right now.) Your Consumer is the thread that wants to get something off the buffer.  It has access to a ConsumerBarrier , which is created by the RingBuffer and interacts with it on behalf of the Consumer .  While the ring buffer obviously needs a se
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