Fun run of JClarity Censum - Garbage Collection analysis tool

I have downloaded the 14 days trial of JClarity Censum. It's EXTREMELY simple to use and gives you a quick feedback on your GC issues.

First, you HAVE to enable a few flags: -XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution and -XX:+PrintGCDetails (safe in PROD). Then you run your tests for some 24 hours and feed your GC log into Censum.

It gives you statistical info like:

Longest GC pause (I had 5 seconds, quite bad)

Percentage of time spent in GC pauses (mine is 9%, pretty bad, should be max 5%)

Average memory allocation rate (I had 90 MB / second, quite bad)

Max memory allocation rate (I had 900 MB / second, horrible)

Total Full GC pause time, and Total Pause time

Full GC to GC ratio (mine was 45%, pretty stiff)

Application throughput (percentage of time spent working, versus time spent in GC.... should be 95% or more)

The graphs are breathtaking...

All in all, they charge you a quite hefty (ANNUAL!) fee for this software... to perform analysis that doesn't seem all that complicated - I am sure I can figure out most of this stuff in Excel in a matter of hours!

However, if your time is precious, it seems a quite valuable tool...

Quick personal wiki with ZIM

the better alternative to text files in Notepad++:
http://www.glump.net/software/zim-windows
you can save the wiki files in a local Dropbox folder, so you can automatically recover them from any other location.

Top 20 tools for a developer

I enjoyed this video on the top 20 tools for a developer to use. It's REALLY enjoyable, the guy Roy Osherove www.oredev.org is VERY smart. His blog here http://5whys.com/

Unfortunately it mostly covers .NET technology....no Java stuff.

Here is the list:

Task Board
Two screens
Daily Standups
Everything Search Engine
Total Commander

Red Gate Reflector (this is for .NET)
Resharper (this is Visual Studio stuff)
TestDriven.net (also .NET thingie)

Amazon EC2
TeamCity

HG Mercurial Source Control (local commit)

Fog Bugz (a sort of Jira)
Gibraltar Logging cool remote debugging application for .NET (I like the concept!)

Crypto Licensing (licensing tool)

Amazon Simple Notification Service