Smalltalk Solutions Plug of the Day, 7/11/03

Today's spotlight is on Don MacQueen's JWARS Tuning talk:

JWARS performance tuning presentation Donald MacQueen: JWARS Tuesday 3:00:00 pm to 3:30:00 pm

Abstract: JWARS (the Joint Warfare System) is a simulation, written in VisualAge Smalltalk, that models theater level warfare. One of its primary requirements is that the model run 1000:1; that is, a 100 day campaign (2400 hours) must run in 2.4 hours.

This presentation will discuss how we improved JWARS runtime from 133:1 to over 1500:1 by using the profiler, experimenting with settings for old space, and taking care not to overtax the garbage collector.

Bio: Donald MacQueen has been a jWarrior since 1997. He recently added sonobuoy modelling to JWARS for the US Navy. His love affair with Smalltalk began in 1992 when he was toiling in the C++ salt mines, and it's been sunshine and blue skies ever since.