An Alternative Multi-Producer Approach

Recently on InfoQ, Aliaksei Papou posted an article on some of his experiments with high performance interchange of messages between threads.  There were a number of examples within the article, but I am going to focus on the multi-producer case.  One of the optimisations that the article showed was that if you knew the number of producers that you have at initialisation time you can build a structure that significantly reduces contention.  The existing MultiProducerSequencer does not have this constraint, which is essential for a large number of use cases.  However, I wanted to see what we could achieve if I applied this approach to this Disruptor.

Fonts on Fedora Core 19

I recently upgraded my personal workstation from Ubuntu 12.04 to Fedora Core 19.  I'm very happy with the change, I prefer the standard Gnome 3 to Canonical's Unity desktop.  Probably something to do with my workstation not being a tablet.  However, one of the annoyances with Fedora Core has always been its font rendering.  It was never as nice a default Ubuntu install.  However after a couple of days of digging I've managed to figure out the magic incantation required to get all of my fonts looking good, including in Google Chrome.

Release of Disruptor 3.0.0

I've decided that I'm a bit bored of the whole putting a beta tag on various versions of the Disruptor so I've decide to send forth Disruptor 3.0.0 into the world. The big challenges of this release were to clean up the code and come up with a better algorithm for handling multiple producers. If I was lucky, make it even faster. I went down a couple of dark alleys initially with this release, but have come up again for air with a version that is less different to the 2.x version, but still brings some nice benefits.  I had wanted to implement a few more functional tests and improve the documentation, but I could be waiting forever to those aspects to a level where I was 100% satisfied.