NetKernel News Volume 1 Issue 16

February 19th 2010

What's new this week?

• Several performance optimizatons including a 40% faster kernel.
• Some optimization updates to core modules.

NKSE Repository Updates

kernel: We are preparing an NKperf system benchmarking tool. This work resulted in some enhancements to the kernel (the first significant changes for nearly 2 years). Firstly we removed a very narrow, but potential, race condition when receiving an asynchronous exception response - we'd never seen this but its fixed anyway.

The second update is a redesigned data structure for the scheduler request queue - this eliminates a Java level contention that limited throughput (especially with asnyc requests). Net result of these changes is that the kernel is faster, for async requests this can be up to 40% in some scenarios.

layer0: removed synchronization from RegexRewriteRule this improves concurrent throughput of the http bridge and filesets indirectly.

standard module: fix to overlay base classes to enable metadata for non-absolute logical endpoint identifiers to be resolved correctly. For example. this update eliminates the possibility of prototype discovery failure inside a mapper.

http-server: Another performance enhancement, we increased throughput of http sessions by optimising stale session reaping.

nkse-control-panel: made endpoints threadsafe to increase throughput.

system-core services: updated to account for kernel changes

nkse-unit-tests: updated with tests for new kernel etc.

layer1: active:exec accessor fixed stderr processing and has improved documentation.

nkse-docs: Javadoc generation now works again after a screw up when we removed a cross-package dependency last week.

Short and sweet this week but lots of stuff will break cover next week. Watch this space...

Have a great weekend.