Ari Zilka, Founder, Terracotta

Prior to founding Terracotta in 2003, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. At Walmart.com, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures.

Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and before that at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. During these years, he managed development and advised businesses on high technology strategy and deployment. His accomplishments at Sapient include the successful launch of Walmart.com, as well as successful engagements with Gap.com and Nike.com. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he worked with Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ari's career started as a software engineer for a subsidiary of Motorola, where he wrote groundbreaking wireless paging software. Since then, his software development accomplishments also include projects revolving around statistical analysis and data warehousing. In the mid 1990's, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Presentation: "When is garbage not garbage? Using Ehcache to overcome the JVM's limitations"

Track: Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability

Time: Thursday 12:05 - 13:05

Location: City Room

Abstract: Many architects hope the G1 and concurrentmarksweep garbage collectors can keep applications running optimally. The problem with garbage collectors is that they end up randomly pausing our Java applications. It gets worse as the heap gets larger. Meanwhile, machines are now shipping with 16GB or more of RAM; pauses can turn into seconds or even minutes. Ehcache has a much easier time managing the cache and figuring out what to keep and toss out. In this talk, we will cover the details of garbage collection in large scale JVMs. We will gain a shared understanding of the challenges for a generic collector and we will also learn how Ehcache has found a way to hide the cache's contents from the collector's view. We will demo a huge JVM running with its cache as heap objects versus letting Ehcache manage that same memory while still keeping that data inside the JVM. Last, we will discuss the implications of this new Java memory management capability on scaling--should apps be scaled up or continue to scale out? This talk is an advanced talk but it is not one limited to huge clustered applications. You should attend this talk if you want your application to run faster and be easier to develop.

Presentation: "Scaling Australia's Most Popular Online News Sites with Enterprise Ehcache"

Track: Solutions Track: Friday

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Concordia Room

Abstract: Matthias Matook, Enterprise Architect at Ecetera Pty. Ltd in Sydney, and Ari Zilka, Founder and CTO of Terracotta, share the real-world experience of implementing Enterprise Ehcache at Australia’s most visited online news sites. The talk will focus on the challenges and technical solutions to deal with massive page hits, high concurrency and how to achieve linear scalability without additional hardware.