Synchronisation in .NET– Part 2: Unsafe Data Structures and Padding

In the previous blog post we saw how the lock() statement in .NET scales very poorly when there is a contention on a data structure. It was clear that a performance logging framework that relies on an array with a lock on each member to store data will not scale.

Today, we will try to quantify just how much performance we should expect to get from the data structure if we somehow solve locking. We will also see how the underlying hardware primitives bubble up through the .NET framework and break the pretty object oriented abstraction you might be used to.

Because we have already proven that ConcurrentDictionary adds to much overhead, we will focus on arrays as the backing store for the data structure in all future implementations.

Joining FusionIo

I am very happy to announce that I have signed a contract with FusionIo and will be joining them as CTO of EMEA from 1st September 2012.

As many of you know, I have worked together with FusionIo on many occasions  and really enjoyed the collaboration. I believe that their products hold the keys to a new era of computing and it is an honour to join their ranks. I will be looking forward to doing a lot of exciting research and customer implementations for them.

This brings me to the work I have been doing since I left Microsoft. Here is how it will transfer:

Consulting Contracts

I have contracts with some customers open. These are all due to terminate before 1st September and I will of course honour my agreements here. Unfortunately, my new job will not allow me to continue the collaboration with these customers on a consulting basis after this. The good news is that my courses will still be available and I will be able to share my knowledge through this channel.

Courses and Conferences

Contributing information to the community is one of my great passions in life. FusionIo has allowed me to continue to pursue this interest. My courses will still be available, although only for a very limited amount of days every month as the course time will be coming out of my vacation days (hint on how to get a discount). I expect demand to be high. There are already  three tuning courses set up across Europe which will be held as planned and a lot of people have made it clear they want more. I will be announcing the exact dates for courses planned on this blog soon and let you know how to join the courses that are open to the public. The material is looking amazing and is using the new format that has evolved at SQL BITS and driven the top scores there. I expect this will be my best presentations yet. I am also happy to announce that my data modelling course is well underway and will be available soon.

I will continue to submit abstracts for conferences and stay in close touch with the community, just like I have always done. And  this brings me to:

Grade of the Steel

I am very excited that FusionIo has an interest in expanding the testing I have done with my Grade of the Steel Project. I will continue to run benchmarks on the latest and greatest storage and provide non volatile memory specific configuration and tuning guidance. Exactly which format the publications will take is too early to say, I will keep you posted on this blog.

My First Course is now Available

I am proud to announce that my first course: Tuning – Diagnosing and Fixing Hard Problems is now available. This is the first in what I expect to be a series of 5 courses that I am developing to share my knowledge with the field (for a price this time).

You can find details of the course on my Courses Page.

How to Properly Wipe and Return a Laptop

This week, I had the chance to experience something that is a rare occurrence: returning a laptop to my employer. Microsoft has been good to me, and I wanted to make sure I properly returned the laptop to them and saved both them and me from hassle.

In this blog, I will describe a process for properly wiping a laptop of data and making it ready for a new owner. You may want to use this advice if you plan to sell an old machine to a friend too.

Don’t Become a One-trick Architect

We are near the dawn of a new workload: BigData. While some people say that “it is always darkest just before the dawn”. I beg to differ: I think it is darkest just before it goes pitch black.  Have a cup of wakeup coffee, get your eyes adjusted to the new light, and to flying blind a bit, because the next couple of years are going to be really interesting.

In this post, I will be sharing my views on where we have been and a bit about where we are heading in the enterprise architecture space. I will say in advance that my opinions on BigData are just crystalizing, and it is most likely that I will be adjusting them and changing my mind.

SQLBits and Phones

My presentation from SQLBits: “Finding the Limits: The Grade of The Steel” should be online soon. There is a lot of stuff to blog about and so little time to do it. It was some fun days of tuning as the picture shows.

I am curious to hear comments on my session. Was it useful? What other tests would you like to see? Do you prefer this presentation style over other styles (no, I won’t do demos!).

Special thanks to the good people over at Fusion-io for letting me use their kit to run tests. You guys rock!

In other news: I finally found a phone that is just a phone. It is called the Nokia X2, I had it for only a few days and I am already liking it a lot. So far, it has survived on only one charge.

DL980 Configuration Guidance published

The Asian CAT team, together with Jimmy May (The Aspiring geek himself), the MS PFE SAP team and HP have published a very interesting blog about DL980 configuration:

• Customer Proof of Concept on New HP DL980

If you plan to run on that machine, I highly recommend you read up on the great information in the blog.

Whenever you play around with an HP server, I generally recommend you download and skim through the QuickSpec. It gives you the details of how the machine is laid out – the PCI card speeds and placement come in quite handy when you configure the machine with FusionIO.

Another good resource for large machine tuning is to take a look at the full disclosure reports on TPC-E runs