Archive for the 'GigaSpaces' Category
GigaSpaces’ upcoming cloud framework
September 5th, 2008Recently I had the pleasure of doing a demo to one of our partners using the new “cloud framework”.This framework brings forth 3 key concepts, which we think are essential to successfully develop, test and deploy any scalable transaction applicatio…
GigaSpaces & Maven Setup : a mini-recipe
August 28th, 2008When trying out the bundled Maven tool that now ships with GigaSpaces, I found it friendly to my sensibilities to create a couple of new scripts:
I placed both of these in the GS_HOME/tools/maven directory:
- The first one sets up the necessary paths before calling the installmavenrep.bat that comes with GigaSpaces:
mavensetup.cmd
set M2_HOME=%~dp0apache-maven-2.0.9
set PATH=%PATH%;%M2_HOME%\bin
call installmavenrep.bat
- The second one starts up a new shell with the paths set so that maven commands will function as expected by the GigaSpaces documentation:
mavenshell.cmd
set M2_HOME=%~dp0apache-maven-2.0.9
set GS_HOME=%~dp0..\..
set PATH=%PATH%;%M2_HOME%\bin;%GS_HOME%\bin
start “MAVEN SHELL”
Once in my “MAVEN SHELL”, I can create a new application that uses the mirror service by executing:
C:\gigaspaces-xap-6.6.0-m3\tools\maven>mvn os:create dashDgroupId=com.test.mirror dash
DartifactId=MyFirstMirrorApp dashDtemplate=basic-async-persistency
With the project created – and quickly too! I now add another script to the mix:
- This script lives in the root directory of the newly generated project.
In this example that would be the MyFirstMirrorApp directory found on my machine here:
C:\gigaspaces-xap-6.6.0-m3\tools\maven\MyFirstMirrorApp>
- The purpose of this script is to start up each of the aspects of the project in the proper order and demonstrate that it all works:
(Note: I execute this from within my “MAVEN SHELL” after CD‘ing into the MyFirstMirrorApp directory)
runmyproject.cmd
rem note you must setup mvn before trying to run this project in this way…
start mvn compile os:run dashDmodule=mirror
echo sleep
ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 60000 > NUL
start mvn compile os:run -Dcluster=“total_members=2,1″ -Dmodule=processor
echo sleep
ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 60000 > NUL
start mvn compile os:run -Dmodule=feeder
Once everything is running, I can start the GigaSpaces management User Interface by executing: the following from within my “MAVEN SHELL“
>start gs-ui
Now comes the time for the final script of the day:
- I store this script in the tools/maven directory.
- This is once again executed from within the same “MAVEN SHELL” that I have been using up until now.
- This script starts up the HSQL Viewer and connects to the database being used by the mirror service to store data:
lookatmydb.cmd
mvn os:hsql-ui
dashDdriver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
dashDurl=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/testDB
executing the following query while in that viewer shows the data stored there :
select * from PUBLIC.DATA
Edge High Performance Computing
August 27th, 2008I ran across this excellent article on Edge HPC and by golly, it sounds like the need for both of the following is growing at a huge rate:
- Increasing the efficiency of the software solutions made to solve business problems
- Providing adaptability of software systems to changes such as increased load and failures
They call this new landscape: “Edge High Performance Computing“, as opposed to “High Performance Computing“
To my mind the major difference here between these classes of problems is the need to maintain state and the capacity to leverage less-exotic hardware and more “modern” and likely Object-Oriented software languages such as .NET, C++ and Java.
I like very much the quality of the content of the Tabor research work and look forward to future updates from them regarding these topics.
Owen.
Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales.
August 27th, 2008The GigaSpaces CTO, Nati Shalom, dropped me a line recently pointing out a recent article on High Scalability, which is very interesting. There is an excerpt from the article below:
Latency matters. Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.
The Amazon results were reported by Greg Linden in his presentation Make Data Useful. In one of Greg’s slides Google VP Marissa Mayer, in reference to the Google results, is quoted as saying “Users really respond to speed.” And everyone wants responsive users. Ka-ching! People hate waiting and they’re repulsed by seemingly small delays.
The less interactive a site becomes the more likely users are to click away and do something else. Latency is the mother of interactivity. Though it’s possible through various UI techniques to make pages subjectively feel faster, slow sites generally lead to higher customer defection rates, which lead to lower conversation rates, which results in lower sales. Yet for some reason latency isn’t a topic talked a lot about for web apps. We talk a lot about about building high-capacity sites, but very little about how to build low-latency sites. We apparently do so at the expense of our immortal bottom line.
I wondered if latency went to zero if sales would be infinite? But alas, as Dan Pritchett says, Latency Exists, Cope!. So we can’t hide the “latency problem” by appointing a Latency Czar to conduct a nice little war on latency. Instead, we need to learn how to minimize and manage latency. It turns out a lot of problems are better solved that way.
How do we recover that which is most meaningful–sales–and build low-latency systems?
Well, the answer to that questions is “you choose product that are built to handle your latency requirements whilst still allowing you to support scale”. Again it’s clear that Tier Based Architectures with their mish-mash of separate cluster implementations are not only state bound at each tier but are also complex to manage and maintain. GigaSpaces has been talking about these things for a long time now and it’s good to see that there are more general debates and hard evidence of the affects of not building your systems this way.
Why pure caching or compute grids are not enough
August 24th, 2008I came across an interesting comment in our forum from one of our users:I’m doing a PoC for use GigaSpaces in our applications, to have one complete solution, instead of using other distributed cache & computing. Also I’m hoping to…
