Updates to the Spanish-English glossary

Various new entries have been added to the Javamex site's Spanish-English glossary of computing terms. For those not familiar with the glossary, it contains English translations of various Spanish computing terms, covering various IT topics such as programming, networking, the Internet, software and hardware, GUIs etc.

Information on memory usage of objects

The section on Java memory usage now contains the following additional articles:

• information on how to calculate the memory usage of a Java object in general, considering the memory used for "housekeeping" by the JVM
• calculating the memory usage of Strings, which can often the type of object to use up the biggest proportion of space in a Java application: this section actually considers the memory use of string-related objects such as StringBuffers and StringBuilders

A section on reducing the memory taken up by Strings looks at string canonicalisation, a fairly standard approach (but one which requires certain caveats), plus introduces the example of a CompactCharSequence class, that stores strings as 1 byte per character, thus taking up around half othe memory taken up by a regular Java String (at the expense of not supporting Unicode).

Comments on these articles welcome as usual.

Beta: Classmexer agent

The beta version of a simple instrumentation tool is available for download from the Javamex site. The Classmexer jar provides various calls for querying the memory usage of Java objects. Via the provided MemoryUtil class.deepMemoryUsageOf() method, it is possible to get an estimate from the JVM of the number of bytes taken up by an object and its "subobjects" (objects referred to by a non-public reference, or by references with other visibility criteria). The memory usage of subobjects is combined recursively (so subobjects of subobjects are considered etc), but without counting the same object more than once.

A variant of the call is also provided which gives the total memory usage of several objects at a time, without counting as duplicates objects referenced by more than one of the objects.

Updates to profiling section

Firstly, some minor corrections and additions to the Java profiling section. The corrections mainly concern a couple of typos that crept into the variable names of the examples. Readers should be reassured that the code, like that of the site in general, is copied and pasted from working, live profiling code. But things such as variable names are occasionally changed or shortened for the purposes of making it clearer on the site, and that seems to be where the errors crept in. I've also taken the opportunity to add a few links to other sections of the site (such as the section on threading, sleep() and yield()) that were added since the profiling tutorial was written.

Readers interested in Java profiling may also be interested in the first page of an upcoming section on Java and memory. This first page looks at how to find out the memory usage of a Java object. The technique involves using the Java Instrumentation framework introduced in version 5 of the language to query the JVM directly for the size of an object. Although slightly fiddly to set up, the technique has the advantage that there's less guesswork involved than if we were to just estimate an object's size (although future pages in the section will nonetheless look at estimation).

RSS feeds of Java tutorials

The Javamex web site now publishes various RSS feeds containing links to articles published recently or on particular topics of frequent interest. The available feeds are as follows:

• Main RSS feed: all Java programming articles published in the past 3 months
• Java threading feed: recent articles on multithreading and concurrency (including both "classical" thread programming and the Java 5+ concurrency libraries)
• Java Web programming feed: articles on topics such as Servlets and AJAX programming
• Java collections and algorithms feed: articles covering the Java collections framework itself, plus other algorithm-related frameworks such as compression
• Java performance feed: performance and profiling-related articles
• Java Regular expressions feed

Suggestions are welcome if you think there's a feed on another theme that you think would be useful.

New section: using threads in Java

The first articles in this new section look primarily at how to use "raw" threads in Java. As well as the basics such as how to create a thread and stop or interrupt it, the section looks at more advanced threading topics such as:

How threads work

A look at threads "under the hood": an examination of some of the details of thread scheduling, and the implications of different scheduling algorithms for Java threads and the methods that control them.

Thread priorities

How they work (or rather, how they don't work...) on specific operating systems. Did you know, for example:

• on Linux, setPriority() has no effect pre Java 6, and that even then you need to run as rootand use a special command-line flag?
• on Windows, the implementation of setPriority() changed between Sun's Java 5 and Java 6 implementations?
• on Windows, thread priorities have little effect on threads competing for CPU?

See the article for more information.

sleep() and yield()

Information on the limitations and behaviour of sleep() under different load, sleep granularity, and bugs in the Windows implementation. And finally, find out what yield() actually does...!

Suggestions welcome!

As with all sections of the Javamex site, suggestions are very welcome here for new topics or specific questions you'd like to see answered. Updates and additions will be added periodically. Corrections are also very welcome since, particularly in the case of the some of the threading topics, I have tried to pull together information which is elusive or described in contradictory ways in different sources!