Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 20 years.
Throughout Doug's career, he has focused on creating performance intensive applications
in Java ranging from bioinformatics to financial exchanges.
After 10 years as a Java developer, Doug transitioned to working on Azul's Java Virtual Machine.
Today, Doug continues his interest in building performance tools for developers working on Datadog's Java Application Performance Monitoring.
While Doug's passion for developing software remains, his true passion is in sharing his
interest in low-level details and JVM performance with others.
Today, we all benefit from the sophistication of modern compilers and hardware, but that extra complexity can also make it difficult to reason about performance.
Early releases of Java performed poorly, but those issues largely disappeared long ago with the introduction of HotSpot. However, much of the performance advice for Java persists through hearsay from those early days.
HotSpot provides a variety of garbage collectors with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To get the most out of our applications, we need to pick the right garbage collector and design to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its weaknesses.
HotSpot provides a variety of garbage collectors with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To get the most out of our applications, we need to pick the right garbage collector and design to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its weaknesses.