I’ve landed, and I’m bloggin’. This is a stretch, as I don’t do much social networking of any type, but we’ll give this a trial run and see how this goes.

Almost done with CritSit efforts at my current client, things are about to move into an upgrade scenario while minimizing downtime. I’m sure I’ll be involved in this as I’ve been involved in the installation and the troubleshooting of critical situations.  We’re trying to upgrade their entire enterprise environment while minimizing downtime to a mere 3 hours!!  This is especially difficult since we’re facing a full database backup and a file system backup as well as a content migration.  There are a lot of moving pieces here and my company has been tasked with upgrading their environment while reducing downtime to a VERY LOW minimum.  Challenges, but welcome ones.

On a more technical level, I was involved in some really interesting efforts at a recent client. We were using a distributing cache across multiple disks to reduce read/write times. Performance increases were nearly 800%! It’s very nice for a client to see you’ve improved the efficiency of one part of their environment by such a large margin.

On a new note, looking at some new performance issues where a client is having a java process eat up 60+% of the system CPU. Not the user CPU usage (linux). We’re talking system CPU. Now we have to investigate and find out where this usage is going. Time to dig through some heap/thread dumps and see what is going on.