JavaZone 2010 - Multicore and Event Driven Architectures
You thought you would get away from your performace problems at the next data center upgrade. The upgrade arrived, and they announced proudly that performance is now 35 % better. But, when you measure, the system is actually running slower - each request response time has become longer.
This nightmare scenario is a realistic risk for most multi-user systems as they are written and deployed today. What has happened is that the shift from "faster processors" to "more cores" changes the characteristics of performance (latency and response time vs capacity and throughput). What we risk is that our software architecture will not be able to take advantage of hardware upgrades.
Thus the shift to multicore will push us out of the "call stack comfort zone" and force us to rethink how we model and architect our systems.
When looking for a new mind-set that will help us out from this performance and scalability nightmare, Event Driven Architectures seems like one of the best ideas around.
Dan Bergh Johnsson
With his background in programming, Dan Bergh Johnsson has taken a wider interest in system development and is equally interested in architecture and methodology. He as been the formal or informal lead architecture for several business critical systems since he left Uppsala University with a firm opinion that "code should mean something".
Dan is an agile affectionado and a domain driven design enthusiast who also has spent a lot of time thinking about architecture, non-functional quality attributes, and how all these fit together. He shares his love in the craft by engaging heavily in Swedish agile communities, by speaking at conferences, and through his blog "Dear Junior - letters to a junior programmer".
Dan is also partner at and the official spokesperson on "Architecture and Development Methodology" of Swedish security consultancy firm Omegapoint.