iO Associates are delighted to bring the next instalment in our series of Java Virtual Meetups. This meetup featured Deputy CTO of Azul Systems, Simon Ritter who presented a fantastic talk on ‘Java at Speed: Building a Better JVM’ earlier in the week.

Getting the best performance out of your Java applications can often be a challenge due to the managed environment nature of the JVM and the non-deterministic behaviour that this introduces.

This session started by looking at what we mean by speed and how the JVM, whilst extremely powerful, means we don’t always get the performance characteristics we want.  Simon then moved on to discuss the three critical features of the Zing JVM that address these issues:

-The C4 garbage collector, which eliminates GC pauses that affect the performance of an application even after all hot code paths have been compiled and optimised.
-The Falcon JIT compiler that leverages the LLVM open source project to provide optimisations specific to the newest CPU architectures using features like AVX2.
-ReadyNow!, which allows details of speculative optimisations and JIT profiling to be logged on production systems.  ReadyNow! profiles can then be used to substantially reduce the warmup and deoptimisation issues that affect performance when restarting an application.

About the Speaker
Simon Ritter is the Deputy CTO of Azul Systems.  Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K. Simon joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and started working with Java technology from JDK 1.0; he has spent time working in both Java development and consultancy.  Having moved to Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition, he managed the Java Evangelism team for the core Java platform.  Now at Azul, he continues to help people understand Java as well as Azul’s JVM technologies and products.  Simon has twice been awarded Java Rockstar status at JavaOne and is a Java Champion.  He currently represents Azul on the JCP Executive Committee and on the Java SE Expert Group. Follow him on Twitter, @speakjava.

You can watch the full video below:

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It was great to see so many familiar and new faces as this session. iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so please get in touch if you have any suggestions on future topics or speakers!

In addition, if there’s anything we can help you with in regards to sourcing candidates or finding a new role please do also get in touch.