Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Interesting links for October 12th through October 19th:

• Groovy Grails and Webby Things : Low Cost Grails / Java Web Hosting – How much server memory do you need? – > ps -ux | grep java
  USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
  root 9431 0.0 1.6 417444 137968 ? Sl Oct27 18:06 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun[..]

  The important values are VSZ and RSS ones. VSZ is the maximum memory the java application will ever use and reserve from the operation system at startup. RSS is the current memory in use. The difference between VSZ and RSS is the free memory available to your java application. Your application should never push RSS near VSZ or out-of-memory exceptions will happen and crash your application and/or the java virtual machine. In this example the JVM reserves 407m of memory, but actually uses 134m. The maximum heap space given was 192m specified by the JVM argument "-Xmx192m" at startup. Notice that the JVM needs more memory than the heap space. How do you calculate the best heap space value?

• Groovy and java « Software Development asides – In the past I have embedded scripting languages like TCL/TK in C/C++ based applications. Consultants can then add functionality to a product at a client site with much less effort than is required by the R&D staff. BUT the two languages sit apart and to provide C++ functions to TCL, well add it to the R&D guys job list.

  Groovy makes the sometimes verbose Java more palatable. But more importantly, it is very easy to mix the two and in a far more advanced way than one could have ever done with TCL and C/C++.

• It's time to start a balanced debate about Turkish EU membership – European integration has always been an elite project which, more often than not, has suffered setbacks precisely when it sought public support. The nature of representative democracy is such that elected officials take decisions on behalf of the electorate. Nonetheless, this does not (and should not) absolve the political elites of their responsibility to conduct a reasoned and balanced public debate about the potential costs and benefits of the perhaps most controversial item on the EU agenda: Turkish EU membership. Specifically, it is high time to subject the arguments most commonly deployed against Turkish EU membership to thorough scrutiny.