keith.adams

Keith Adams

Co-founder of Facebook’s Runtime: HipHop Virtual Machine

Keith Adams is a founding member of Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) team. HHVM is a Facebook's just-in-time compiler for PHP. Keith has also contributed to Facebook's search engine. Before Facebook, he worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor. He's a founding member of the I-can't-believe-I'm-a-PHP-advocate club.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tuning Location: Grand Ballroom - Salon A/B/C/D Abstract:

Counter-intuitively, the effects of tuning (tweaks to a system in response to real workloads) often dominate the effects of fundamentally better technology. Well-tuned, bad systems usually outperform less mature, better systems.

In this talk, Facebook’s Keith Adams, co-founder of HHVM, the runtime which powers the largest website in the world, will cover:

The evidence base: examples where well-tuned incumbents outperformed better, but less mature designs, in both hardware and software

The tragedy: how our ignorance of this effect limits technical progress

Challenges for planning complex technical projects

One of the examples covered will be Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine, which was 7x slower than its performance target at the start. Today, it is 2x faster than that original goal. Yet the block-diagram level design of the system is unchanged. There have been no research breakthroughs, conceptual insights, or heroic ground-up rewrites. The 14x difference came instead from tuning: HHVM now does thousands of small things slightly better.

Java vs. C/C++ Performance Panel
Track: Java at the Cutting Edge

Location:
Grand Ballroom A

Abstract:
This is a question that almost everyone doing a major project asks: should I use C++, or Java, or C#? Maybe it is more abstract than that, such as, should I use native code, like C++, or a managed runtime, like Java? Mostly, this is a matter of taste. Or is it? When it comes to ultimate performance, most applications are native, C++/C, with even having some hand crafted assembler mixed in.

But can Java, or any managed runtime in general, do nearly as good? Or maybe it could do better than native code. What could applications do to leverage the most out of these languages? With C++11, has the game changed? With Java 7 or 8, has the game changed? Or has the game really changed with the acceptance of Erlang? These and more, fellow developers, will be questions asked on this panel. It is native code vs. managed runtime in the game of performance!