Software Generalist

Reading Notebook: 18-Jan-09

Comments in italics are mine and express my own views, thoughts and opinions

Developer’s Guide to Debugging by M. Wloka, et al.:

Performance bugs include slow and fast program runs (p. 63) - Do I need to include them in my collection of patterns?

Upfront performance analysis before debugging performance problems (p. 64) - can be delegated to troubleshooting engineer

Measuring time (pp. 64 - 65) - Complex products sometimes write time for every trace statement like Citrix Common Diagnostic Facility (CDF) technology based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Also memory dumps usually have various times saved inside.

Varying CPU clock speed (p. 67)

Disconnect computer from network for clean testing to remove possible network influence on execution time (p. 68)

Concurrent Programming on Windows by J. Duffy:

Spin waiting causes CPU spikes and blocks threads (pp. 63 - 64) - See my real life patterns Dispatch Level Spin and Affine Thread http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2008/01/25/crash-dump-analysis-patterns-part-44/ and http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2008/06/27/crash-dump-analysis-patterns-part-68/

Busy-waiting for fine-grained concurrency to avoid scheduling costs (p. 65)

Continuation passing style (CPS) as alternative to waiting - packaging the rest of computation into some code that we pass to an interface that runs the continuation when the wait condition is satisfied (p. 66)

(Event, predicate) -> race condition -> monitor (critical region, conditional variable) (p. 68)

Structured parallelism - coordination abstraction (cobegin, forall, futures) (p. 70)

Message passing (encapsulation of inter-thread states) (p. 71)

Shared memory as an optimization to message passing (p. 71)

Coordination and Concurrency Runtime - first-class message passing (MS Robotics SDK) (p. 73)

Software Factories by J. Greenfield, et. al.:

Didn’t have time to read today

Software Engineering Foundations: A Software Science Perspective, by Y. Wang:

Didn’t have time to read today

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -