Thanks to Apress for trusting me as a first time author; your support means everything to me.
Shawn McKinney of the Apache Foundation was the first person who thought I could write a book. Shawn, your early encouragement and honest feedback on crazy ideas have been invaluable, and you were always the first to provide feedback on any new code. Thanks. Mike Scheuter is one of the smartest people I know; he’s a longtime friend, mentor, and colleague from FIS who first taught me to fall in love with stack traces and so many other things, work-related and otherwise. Thanks to my employer FIS and to our PerfCoE team. FIS’ continued executive-level support for great performance throughout the enterprise is unique in the industry. Thank you for that.
Dr. Liz Pierce, the Chair of the Information Science department at UA Little Rock, orchestrated an 8-hour Java performance workshop that I gave in early June, 2017. Thanks, Dr. Liz for your support, and thanks to the 15 or so students, faculty, and others who gave up two Saturday afternoons to geek out on performance. Loved it. The CMG Canada group in Toronto was also kind enough the vet some of these ideas a month or two prior. Thanks.
In 2011, I won a best paper and best speaker award at a cmg.org international performance conference. The famous American computer scientist Jeff Buzen, who made many contributions to the field of queueing theory, led the committee that selected me for those awards. CMG’s support (monetary and otherwise) way back then provided the confidence I needed to publish this book many years later. Thank you Jeff, thank you CMG.
There are many others who have helped in various ways: Joyce Fletcher and Rod Rowley who gave me my first tuning job way back in 2006. Thanks to Mike Dunlavey, Nick Seward, Stellus Pereira, David Humphrey, Dan Sobkoviak, and Mike McMillan for their support. To my Dad, Ralph Ostermueller, for your sustained interest and support over many, many months, and to Mom, too.
I’d also like to quickly mention just few of the particular open-source projects that I benefit from every day. Thanks to Trask at Glowroot.org for last minute fixes, to JMeter and JMeter-Plugins. You all rock.
Thanks to Walter Kuketz, Jeremiah Bentch, Erik Nilsson, and Juan Carlos Terrazas for reading late drafts of this book. Erik, your demands for clarity in the early chapters haunted me. Your input forced me to raise my standards a bit; I hope it shows, thanks. Jeremiah, your veteran commentary on SELECT N+1, JPA and other issues helped me fill in big gaps. Thanks. Lastly, to Walter: Your decades of performance/SDLC experience, succinctly imparted, really helped me avoid derailment at the end. Thanks.
To my technical reviewer, Rick Wagner: Rick, what I most loved about working with you, beyond your extensive Java/RedHat experience and beyond your unique experience reviewing so many technical books, was your ability to regularly guide me to paint a more complete picture of software performance for the reader, instead of the 1/2 painted I had started with. Thanks.
Lastly, thanks to my family. My older son Owen’s editing skills are really on display in the introduction, Chapters
and
, and other places as well. He’s 20, knows nothing about programming, but gave me masterful lessons on how to gradually build complex ideas. Who’d a thunk it. Contact him before you write your next book. John, my younger son, helped test the code examples and put up with many brainstorming sessions that finally knocked the right idea out of my head. John’s editing skills lie in smoothing out individual sentences. It turns out, there is a pattern here. My incredible wife Joan Dudley, who teaches college literature, is a-big picture editor for both this book and her students. Joan’s editing contributions are “every paragraph is important” and “clarity takes a back seat to no one.” Joan, you made many sacrifices, holding the fort down while I worked on this insanely long project. I love you and thank you for encouraging me to attempt great things.