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	TABLE OF CONTENTS My Web Server Can Beat Up Your Web Server Making E-mail Better Mind Your V's And Tunes

Mind Your V's And Tunes

"Premature optimization," said Hoare and Knuth, "is the root of all evil." But a lack of optimization can be a route to unemployment—if the app dogs, developers get flogged. No one familiar with the careers of Hoare and Knuth, or their published works, would interpret that epigram as advice to ignore performance, but too many lazy architects have done just that over the years. Granted, there's no royal road to the most efficient design. But tools for identifying performance bottlenecks are now sufficiently powerful that optimization can be a fun intellectual hunt, rather than a frustrating slog.

Case in point: Intel's VTune suite. It's not exactly "new," of course; the company has just come out with Version 8.0. But what's most "noteworthy" is that Intel has added support for Intel Core Duo and dual-core Itanium ("Montecito") processors. (Of course, it still works on your garden-variety Core Solo and previous Intel chips; AMD-heads, however, need not apply.) For 8.0, Intel also added events for measuring parallelism as well as bus and cache sharing, so that you can track how the cores are doing and determine if they're playing nice with each other. The product also includes a Thread Profiler that can identify the "critical paths" as they hop between threads and monitor blocking and switching. With this level of tool support, multicore and multithread optimization goes from terrifying to tractable.

That's not all, of course, but it's the biggie. VTune 8.0 for Windows fully supports both 32- and 64-bit Windows (including Vista and Longhorn Server), integrates with Visual Studio 2005, and offers profiling for .NET 2.0. The Linux version supports 2.6 kernels, read-only filesystems, multiple users, and up to 4096 (!) processors. VTune 8.0 for Linux and for Windows are both priced at $699.

Intel, 2200 Mission College Blvd., Santa Clara, CA 95052, Tel: (408) 765-8080, www.intel.com

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