Java World Interview on Scalability and Other Java Scalability Secrets

OK, this interview is with me on Java scalability issues. I sound like a bigger idiot than I would like, but I suppose it could have been worse. The Java World folks were very nice and did a good job, so there’s no blame on them :-) The interview went an interesting direction, but there’s more I’d like add and I will do so here. Two major rules regarding Java and scalability have popped out at me:

Java – It’s the platform stupid. Java the language isn’t the big win. What is the big win is the ecosystem building up around the JVM, libraries, and toolsets.

Java – It’s the community stupid. A lot of creativity is being expended on leveraging the Java platform to meet scalability challenges. The amazing community that has built up around Java is pushing Java to the next level in almost every direction imaginable. The fecundity of the Java ecosystem can most readily be seen with the efforts to tame our multi-core future. There’s a multi-core crisis going in case you haven’t heard. It’s all you’ll hear mentioned in the halls of the Pentagon. The CPU wizards have maxed out on clock speed and the only way we can scale is by adding more cores. And we don't know how to do that. At 100 cores common ways of doing things break down. Locks don't scale. Cache contention for shared memory slows us down. Bandwidth on the bus is limited. TLB for managing more memory is in short supply. And we need more high speed network cards to handle faster CPUs. And that’s just at the hardware level. It’s worse for programmers. Locking is just a nightmare. I didn't believe that at first. Early in my career I worked on several multi-core systems. I thought everything was cool. Be careful and it will all work out. But work with a group and it all goes to hell. People add functions, locks, take too much time. Problems like deadlock, priority inversion, and high latency all kill a system. What can we do? As we’ll see, Java and more importantly the JVM have become a platform for many interesting technologies and scalability patterns. Let’s take a look at few.

How Java affects both Performance and Scalability

Peter Williams in this very informative blog post discusses how Java affects both performance and scalability. The main points are:

Java does not scale any better, or worse, than any other general purpose language.

How easily can you increase the number of requests/sec the system can handle derives from the architecture of the system (sharding, caching, avoid database etc).

Java’s culture encourages practices that scale only to medium size system because it encourages techniques that do not scale well : * favors multi-threading * shared state * vertical scaling * large monolithic components * multiple tiers, lots of layers

Java is for performance and is the reason to use Java even though the good performance means it scales pretty well out of the box.

Scaling with Java requires going your own way and bucking the culture to implement more scalable practices. Alain Penders makes some good points in the comments:

Java scalable not because it’s better suitable for building scalable systems, but because how to build scalable systems with it is well understood and the components you need to do so are widely available. Not only are those components widely available, they are available from multiple vendors — some free, some commercial — so you’re never locked in, an aspect that’s extremely valuable when producing commercial software.

Ruby & Rails applications can be built to scale well, but the techniques are not as well understood as for Java. Ron takes an apposing view and says Java is less scalable:

During garbage collection all threads are blocked and the garbage collection time can expand to minutes. These huge latencies effectively limit memory which limits scalability.

Increased garbage collection latencies make Java less useful for application that use heart beats, make real-time trades, etc.

Real Time Java API extensions were developed as a way of addressing garbage collection problems. Greg Frank weighs in with some excellent points:

Java language itself has nothing to do with scalability.

Ron’s comments about garbage collection don’t apply to post 1.4 JVMS.

Old-school J2EE is dead.

The monolithic server is being replaced with advanced patterns based on new technologies like jgroups, ehcache and terracotta.

The true force pushing scalability is the java community itself. Java is merely a convenient and commonly spoken language that allows for the formation of a global community.

We should stop debating language internals and start debating sophisticated design patterns that promote scalability.

The Top 10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Application Scalability and Reliability

This is a wonderful presentation by Oracle’s Cameron Purdy. Here’s a PDF. Cameron was CEO of Tangosol before Oracle bought them out. Tangosol made Coherence, a distributed cache. Cameron is a long time prolific contributor to the Java community. His presentation is a must see. He’s both entertaining and technically excellent. The main points he makes in the presentation are:

1. Avoid proprietary features/Believe product claims.

2. Assume the network works

3. Use big JVM machine heaps

4. Use a one-size-fits-all architecture

5. Assume disaster-recovery can be added when it becomes necessary

6. Abuse Abstractions/Avoid abstractions

7. Introduce a single point of bottleneck/Introduce a single point of failure

8. Abuse the database/Avoid the database

9. Assume you are smarter than the infrastructure/Follow the rules blindly

10. Optimize performance assuming that it will translate to scalability/Ignore the potential impact of performance on scalability (and vice-versa). Remember, iff these seem backwards remember these are botching strategies. You'll want to see the presentation to see each point fleshed out in more detail.

Azul

Azul is a Java Compute Appliance and is the ultimate scale-up play for Java. It kind of does what Google App Engine does at the framework level but does it to the JVM at the hardware level. Current standard practice is to deploy Java application across a cluster of commodity servers. Azul does the opposite. It goes big. The most recent release can contain up to 864 processor cores and 768 GB of memory. That’s big. Azul transparently runs unmodified Java applications on their specialized hardware platform which allows even the most mild mannered of Java apps to scale. Their hardware-assisted garbage collector dramatically reduces application pauses and gives access to hundred of gigabytes of RAM. Some very impressive performance improvements are possible. In one case study Breakthrough Scalability of an Application Constrained to an x86 Server, an application was given access to 384 cores and 128 GB of memory on an Azul compute appliance. The result was a 45x improvements in scalability. Scalability was increased along a number of dimensions (quoted from their article):

Thread count: Initially the application was artificially limiting the number of threads that were allowed to execute. With few threads, the application started at 2,200 OPS on Azul (below the 14,000 native score) but by simply increasing the thread pool size and expanding the heap throughput jumped to 60,000 OPS.

Memory locks: When many threads access the same piece of memory, traditional systems force developers to serialize the threads to make sure two threads do not simultaneously change the same memory location (similar to how airlines make sure the same seat is not assigned to two different people.) Azul appliances can detect such collisions in real time and assure correct execution. The removal of two such "hot locks" and a further increase in the number of threads and heap size achieved a new peak of 115,000 OPS.

Logging: Slow applications can afford to maintain logs of unneeded events or even multiple copies of the same information. As throughput increases, the shear volume of such logs make them difficult to analyze and it becomes more practical to log only what is needed. Reducing the amount of logging and addressing a related single threaded bottleneck raised the peak to 350,000 OPS.

More locks: With the above steps taken, a new lock was exposed as a barrier to scalability. Once that was resolved the compute appliance was able to deliver 630,000 OPS – a 45x improvement over the original native performance! If Azul is so cool why aren’t all applications being run on Azul? Buying a completely proprietary hardware platform is too big a risk without a gigantic throbbing pain point. I would like to see Azul open their own cloud so we could get in with low cost and risk.

X10

X10 is not just an inexpensive home automation control system. X10 is also:

A type-safe, modern, parallel, distributed object-oriented language intended to be very easily accessible to Java(TM) programmers. It is targeted to future low-end and high-end systems with nodes that are built out of multi-core SMP chips with non-uniform memory hierarchies, and interconnected in scalable cluster configurations. A member of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) family of languages, X10 highlights the explicit reification of locality in the form of places; lightweight activities embodied in async, future, foreach, and ateach constructs; constructs for termination detection (finish) and phased computation (clocks); the use of lock-free synchronization (atomic blocks); and the manipulation of global arrays and data structures. An Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) has been developed at IBM for X10 to help further increase programmer productivity by providing state-of-the-art functionality for viewing, editing, navigating, executing, and manipulating X10 programs.

X10 is built on top of Java. X10 adds:

value types, nullable

Array language * Multi-dimensional arrays, * aggregate operations

New concurrency features * activities (async, future), atomic * blocks, clocks

Distribution * places * distributed arrays X10 does not have:

Dynamic class loading

Java’s concurrency features

thread library, volatile,synchronized, wait, notify X10 restricts:

Class variables and static initialization The result is hopefully a language that can be scaled across a cluster of mulit-core processors yet still has the familiar Java syntax and is developed using familiar Java development tools like Eclipse.

Clojure, Jruby, Jpython

More of the "it’s the platform stupid." We have many different and interesting languages being built on the JVM platform.

Jruby

Jruby is an 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.

Jpython

Jpython is an 100% pure-Java implementation of the Python programming language.

Clojure

I first came upon Clojure researching software transactional memory (STM) as solution to the problem of how to create easy to write massively parallel programs. STM is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It functions as an alternative to lock-based synchronization. It’s supposed to make writing parallel programs easier. The idea is you can do away with all those nasty locks that cause so many problems. Some have found STM’s performance very disappointing for larger scale applications. And it may ultimately fail simply because everything that inside a transaction boundary is not memory. Programs routinely call out to other services and peripherals. How can STM work in real world environments? STM may not turn out to be the savior of the multi-core world, but Clojure explores some very new Java territory:

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Clojure doesn’t fit my aging mental model. The message-passing actor model of Erlang is more my style. Interestingly the difference between Erlang and Clojure is quite purposeful. Clojure wants to be efficient while operating in the same process rather than taking a message passing hit for every operation. Clojure requires specifying an agent as the receiver of a message where I prefer a more publish-subscribe approach where message senders and consumers are independent. Clojure's use of Java threads makes latency difficult to control. And I'm not sure a S-expression based language can ever become popular. But these are relatively minor issues compared to the task of making Java safe for parallelism. Java does OOP well enough, but sucks at concurrency. Clojure is a nice middle-ground that may be able to make concurrency-oriented programming by real humans in Java a reality.

GigaSpaces, GridGain, Terracotta

GigaSpaces, GirdGain, and Terracotta take Java objects and fairly transparently turn them into highly distributed in-memory grids with amazing out-of-the-box functionality. If RAM is the new disk these products make it very easy to hop on the next generation architecture. Again, their ability to do so much behind the scenes is based on the power of the JVM. Try doing any of this with C++. Can’t happen. Only in the Java world will you see so much cutting edge innovation.

Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi)

One of the major problems with using Java is it’s a pain to deploy a new release across many machines in a data center. Deploying patches and upgrades requires bringing containers down. There’s also isn’t a good way to architect WAR files. Creating one WAR file with multiple services doesn’t work for developers. Creating N WAR files with one service doesn’t scale for containers. And how do you run multiple versions of the same service in the same container? OSGI is a solution that should make dynamic and high availability deployment of Java web services a reality. OSGi is a dynamic module system for Java. Class loading done right. OSGi defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries by creating a microkernel-style architecture. There’s a core set of modules that make up a basic platform and new functionality is dynamically layered in with a plugin. Using OSGi these plugins are isolated, secured and controlled from the rest of code. The unit of deployment is an OSGi bundle, which is simply a JAR file with an OSGi manifest. This approach allows loosely-coupled application modules to be developed by a team of developers. Everything is kept in-sync using version numbers and module dependency ranges. If you’ve ever worked with Linux this should sound familiar. It’s basically how packages are installed on Linux.

Many Companies are Successfully Using Java

Many companies are using Java on their websites, they just don't use the full stack. Java is the ultimate service implementation language. There’s a trend like Amazon to develop in terms of separate services that are composed together to produce pages. Put up a cluster of applications, load balance between them and you are set. This is a big move for internal architecture. Web services now have external APIs. Those same APIs can be used internally to build your site. Java is great for larger web sites who need to start thinking in terms of services.

Fotolog. Fotolog is the poster boy for java scalability. They migrated from PHP to a new, Java-based architecture that, in addition to giving greater flexibility and reuse for future code, allows for a faster response time while halving the number of servers.

Amazon. Amazon uses a serviced based architecture. They are not stuck with one particular approach. Some places they use jboss/java, but they use only servlets, not the rest of the J2EE stack.

eBay. Use what you like and toss what you don't need. Ebay didn't feel compelled to use full blown J2EE stack. They liked Java and Servlets so that's all they used. You don't have to buy into any framework completely. Just use what works for you.

Mailinator. Handles over 1.2 billion emails a year on one rickity old server. The web application, the email server, and all email storage run in one JVM. Java doesn't have to be slow.

Tailrank. They use use Java, MySQL and Linux for our cluster. Java is a great language for writing crawlers. The library support is pretty solid (though it seems like Java 7 is going to be killer when they add closures).

Flickr. They use Java for their node service and as a FTP daemon and for several other services.

Linkedin. LinkedIn’s architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. LinkedIn is 99% Pure Java. They use a service oriented architecture, java, jetty, eh-cache, and spring. Clients post messages via asynchronous Java Communications API using JMS. The WebApp doesn’t do everything itself anymore: they split parts of its business logic into Services. Each Service has its own domain-specific database (i.e., vertical partitioning).

Amazon’s Dynamo. In Dynamo, each storage node has three main software components: request coordination, membership and failuredetection, and a local persistence engine. All these components are implemented in Java.

GoogleTalk. Google’s IM system implemented in Java.

FeedBurner. A news feed management system written in Java. We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve seen how the excesses of old J2EE scalability failures can be routed around with ease using a number of different scalability patterns. We’ve seen some really innovative and amazing products available to Java developers. And we’ve seen a lot of successful websites use Java. Ah, after all that hard work it’s time for another cup of java. Peet’s coffee is my favorite.

Related Articles

Beautiful concurrency by Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

Concurrency Shysters by Bryan Cantrill.

Transactions are tomorrow's loads and stores by Nir Shavit .

Software transactional memory: why is it only a research toy? by too many people to list.

Real-world Concurrency by Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick.

Cantrill and Bonwick get all concurrent-y up in there... by Keith Adams

Fortress - Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability.

Azule’s Cliff Click Jr.’s Blog. The folks at Azul have some very interesting blogs. Check them out.

We Don't Know How To Program by Cliff Click Jr.

JavaOne: Cameron Purdy & ‘The Top 10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Scalability and Reliability by Ben Teese

Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java by Nati Shalom of GigaSpaces. There are also a number very good blogs written by the GigaSpaces folks.

Raising Web Service Updates Efficiency with Dynamic Technologies by Valery Abu-Eid

Building LinkedIn's Next Generation Architecture with OSGi by Yan Pujante

Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP by Bill Clementson.

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Scalability Perspectives #3: Marc Andreessen – Internet Platforms

Scalability Perspectives is a series of posts that highlights the ideas that will shape the next decade of IT architecture. Each post is dedicated to a thought leader of the information age and his vision of the future. Be warned though – the journey into the minds and perspectives of these people requires an open mind.

Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen is known as an internet pioneer, entrepreneur, investor, startup coach, blogger, and a multi-millionaire software engineer best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites. He has recently joined the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay.

Marc is an investor in several startups including Digg, Metaplace, Plazes, Qik, and Twitter. His passion is to create new technologies, to start new companies, and to scale them up.

Internet Platforms Rule the Cloud

From Marc's Blog Post on the Three Kinds of Platforms:

One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet. However, the concept of "platform" is also the focus of a swirling vortex of confusion -- lots of platform-related concepts, many of them highly technical, bleeding together; lots of people harboring various incompatible mental images of what's about to happen in our industry as a consequence of various platforms. I think this confusion is due in part to the term "platform" being overloaded and being used to mean many different things, and in part because there truly are a lot of moving parts at play that intersect in fascinating but complex ways.

Marc attempts to disentangle and examine the topic of "Internet platform" in detail. He has identified three distinct approaches to providing an Internet platform and shows us where each of the three approaches could go.

Internet Platforms Defined

A "platform" is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.
...
The key term in the definition of platform is "programmed". If you can program it, then it's a platform. If you can't, then it's not.

The Internet gives rise to three new models of platform that is playing out in the Internet industry today. Marc calls these Internet platform models "levels", because as you go from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3, each kind of platform is harder to build, but much better for the developer. Further, each level typically supersets the levels below.

Level 1 Platform - "Access API"

This is the kind of Internet platform that is most common today. This is typically a platform provided in the form of a web services API -- which will typically be accessed using an access protocol such as REST or SOAP.

Architecturally, the key thing to understand about this kind of platform is that the developer's application code lives outside the platform -- the code executes somewhere else, on a server elsewhere on the Internet that is provided by the developer.

Examples: eBay, Paypal, Flickr, Delicious

• The entire burden of building and running the application itself is left entirely to the developer
• The easiest kind of Internet platform to create

Level 2 Platform - "Plug-In API"

This is the kind of platform approach that historically has been used in end-user applications to let developers build new functions that can be injected, or "plug in", to the core system and its user interface.

In the Internet realm, the first Level 2 platform that I'm aware of is the Facebook platform.

When you develop a Facebook app, you are not developing an app that simply draws on data or services from Facebook, as you would with a Level 1 platform. Instead, you are building an app that acts like a "plug-in" into Facebook -- your app literally shows up within the Facebook user experience, often as a box in the middle of a page that Facebook otherwise defines, such as a user profile page.

• The third-party app itself lives outside the platform
• The entire burden of building and running a Level 2 platform-based app is left entirely to the developer
• Unlike a Level 1 platform where the burden of exposing the app to users is also placed on the developer, Level 2 Internet platforms -- as demonstrated by Facebook -- will be able to directly help their developers get users for their apps
• Level 2 platforms are significantly harder to create than Level 1 platforms

Level 3 Platform - "Runtime Environment"

In a Level 3 platform, the huge difference is that the third-party application code actually runs inside the platform -- developer code is uploaded and runs online, inside the core system. For this reason, in casual conversation I refer to Level 3 platforms as "online platforms".

In addition, it is highly likely that a Level 3 platform will also superset Level 2 and Level 1 -- i.e., a Level 3 platform will typically also have some kind of plug-in API and some kind of access API.

Put in plain English? A Level 3 platform's developers upload their code into the platform itself, which is where that code runs. As a developer on a Level 3 platform, you don't need your own servers, your own storage, your own database, your own bandwidth, nothing... in fact, often, all you will really need is a browser. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf.

Obviously this is a huge difference from Level 2. And this difference -- and what makes it possible -- is why I think Level 3 platforms are the future.

• Level 3 platforms are much harder to build than Level 2 platforms.
• The level of technical expertise required of someone to develop on your platform drops by at least 90%, and the level of money they need drops to $0
• The Level 3 Internet platform approach is much more like the computer industry's typical platform (PC) model than Levels 2 or 1.

Who is building Level 3 Internet platforms?

Marc has built one - Ning has been built from the start to be a Level 3 platform.

Other Level 3 platforms include:

• Salesforce.com
• Second Life
• Amazon.com
• zembly.com
• Akamai

How will we see the new platforms of the future?

We are used to seeing platforms ship as products -- you buy and install a PC or a server and you build an app that runs on it, or equivalently you download and install an open source platform such as Perl or Ruby and you build an app that runs on it.

The platforms of the future won't be like that. The platforms of the future will be online services that you will tap into over the Internet, perhaps with nothing more running locally than a browser. They won't have anything you download, or even an SDK. They will look more like services than software. To paraphrase the Book of Matthew, "you will know them by their URLs".

Read Marc's full blog post for more details! Can you add more Level 3 Platforms?

Information Sources

• Marc Andreessen's Blog: The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet
• Wikipedia: Marc Andreessen
• CrunchBase: Marc Andreessen
• Internet Pioneers: Marc Andreessen
• Internet Platforms Defined
• Interview with Marc Andreessen from 1995