Heartbeat Thread in Kafka Consumer

Kafka Consumer 0.10.1 has introduced a background thread for sending heartbeat instead of relying on user application thread to keep polling regularly like in the earlier versions. The normal pattern of Kafka consumer looks like the code below Before 0.10.1, heart beat is sent as part of polling for new message. This is by-design mechanism to… Continue reading

Stop The World

I was watching an excellent technical session about Java GC. When the speaker said “Pause is inevitable no matter which collector you use”, a thought suddenly came to my mind that this is also true for living a life. We all has so many things to think about these days in the modern world that time is the… Continue reading

Instance Confinement

Ialmost forgot that I have this story in my to-be-blogged list. I was assigned to perform performance tuning on a system in my previous project. I found a concurrency bottleneck and rearrange the synchronization pattern to gain noticeably throughput. I later had a chance to read about the Instance Confinement technique which could be applied… Continue reading

Cut it out and run

One of the big gaps between seasoned developers and the less experienced ones is the troubleshooting skill. Unlike any other knowledge, this kind of skill is difficult to teach and learn. Developers invest tons of hours to develop his or her own techniques in gathering information and seeing through details to find the root cause… Continue reading