astradele

The earliest IBM Java product I recall using was a 1.1 JVM for Windows 3.1. The reason I probably remember it at all is that it used a fancy trick to simulate filenames longer than 8.3 characters. IIRC, it stored some kind of metadata file alongside the real files.

More recently, I’ve used IBM’s 1.4 JVM, their Jikes compiler, and now their 1.5 JVM (beta), primarily on Linux, although I used 1.4 on Windows as well. At the time I was using the 1.4 versions, I was doing timing comparisons, trying to eke out a little more performance out of the product I was working on. Not only did Jikes make our build process faster (it was much faster than javac), the IBM JVM was noticeably faster and lighter on memory footprint. I don’t remember the numbers anymore, but let’s say about 10-20%.

One interesting benefit of sorts to using an underpowered system is that performance issues really stand out. In my case, my blog runs on Blojsom, which requires a servlet container and thus a JRE to run. Since I used to use recycled PCs that are about a decade old – and now a virtualized host equivalent to a 1994 PC – the basic JVM memory footprint is of concern to me. For awhile I used IBM JVM 1.4, based on my old results.

Since I had to reinstall Java anyway for the hosted machine, I decided to check out some alternatives. I tried Sun’s 1.5 JVM, IBM’s 1.5 JVM, and SableVM. Long story short, IBM took the cake again (running Jetty and Blojsom). Sun’s 1.5 had about the same footprint as IBM 1.4 (30MB), but IBM’s 1.5 came in at 27MB. That’s physical memory according to top. I would expect IBM’s 1.5 to outperform Sun’s 1.5, too, although that’s just “fanboy-ism”.

3MB may not seem like much, but as a percentage (10) and relative to the physical memory for the virtual host (90MB), it’s pretty good. I could certainly pay more for more headroom, but all I really want is not to thrash to swap when doing basic work from a shell. After all, it’s not a production site… and I’m naturally inquisitive about these sorts of things.

[Update: IBM's 1.5 beta had problems staying alive after about three or four hits on the servlet - the process seems to silently exit. I guess IBM's meaning of "beta" is different than Google's; I did get to learn that IBM's 1.5 startup is noticeably faster than IBM's 1.4. I guess I'll use a different JVM for now.]

I normally have about four computers running 24×7 at home. One is my desktop, one is my “stable” server, one is my “unstable” server, and one is my critical services (email). However, all those computers generate a lot of heat (probable an extra 3 degrees Celsius for the room it’s in), noise, and need maintenance (cabling, software updates, don’t knock out the power supply, etc.). I’m also paying for a static IP to make those servers more useful to me outside.

In the spirit of trying to free up time, I looked into hosting services. My requirements were straightforward: Debian Linux, root access, reliable, cheap. I discovered that I actually wasn’t asking for that much. The world of hosting has changed since I last looked at it (years ago): virtualization is the norm and it makes sense. Virtualization is the use of a fast computer to simulate multiple smaller ones, e.g. a dual P4 simulating the equivalent of thirty-two 486 PCs. That may sound odd, until you consider that Linux can run quite well in a low resource environment, particularly if just running headless services.

Since Debian isn’t that popular in the mainstream, I found that there weren’t that many obvious contendors to choose from. In the end, the hardest part was making a judgment call on who was the most reliable. For that, I googled for reviews, recommendations, etc. One benefit of choosing Debian is that it’s popular with the grassroots crowd, who are disproportionately talkative on the Internet. For the cost (U$20/mo), I figured I’d make a best guess, and just bail after a month if I made the wrong choice – it’s not hard to just pull my data out and move it elsewhere.

I chose Rimuhosting, a company in New Zealand. While there were other hosting services that were recommended (A Slashdot article on virtual hosting had a plethora of useful comments and recommendations), Rimuhosting won over the rest because:

• In their News announcements and the Rimuhosting bliki, they know what they’re talking about – or at least, as well as I know.
• The owner (?) of Rimuhosting has a pretty obvious user ID on Slashdot (and advertising signature), so it was easy to read all his posts. They indicated good technical competence and communication ability.
• The website looks good to me, in a functional and aesthetically simple way. This seems superficial, but it’s not entirely. A website that’s broken indicates poor maintenance after all. This one seemed well polished, and regularly received new information. People who take pride in their work, even in the little things, produce better products on average, IMO.

One last interesting “test” is that I passed along some questions when I first signed up. I was interested in the answer, of course, but even more interested in how it was answered. Not only was the signup quick (overnight), so was the response. It was articulate and professional:

Thanks for your order. I’ve setup your VPS and sent out a welcome email with your details. Running a SOCKS proxy should be fine on the VPS. Careful you don’t leave it setup as an open proxy. That can be a fast way to burn through a few hundred GB of traffic. All ports are open on the VPS. If you need our help filtering anything, just let us know. You can run a DNS server wherever you wish. We happen to offer DNS servers that you can configure via our http://rimuhosting.com/cp control panel. There is no cost for using these servers. It typically takes an hour or two for a new IP address to propagate after you change it on your DNS server. See also: http://rimuhosting.com/dns/aboutdns.jsp We keep just the one weekly snapshot. Sometime there _may_ be a second week available. We can restore the whole VPS from it (it is a filesystem snapshot). Or we can restore a single file/directory. There is a $10 restore fee. [snip] We also provide an FTP server you can use to run backups as often as you like. I hope your setup goes smoothly and you get to make the most of your new VPS. Regards, Peter http://rimuhosting.com

So there you have it. A static IP, a few GB of space, and my consolidated services (web server, FTP server, this blog, etc.) running out of a colo in Texas, managed by folks in New Zealand. I love the Internet and globalization. Now I just need to decide what to do with an ornamental Pentium 100.