Hi,
I have a question on hardware platform targeting for Eclipse MAT users. Specifically, do we think it is OK to target SSD/NVME devices with very low seek times for parsing stage, or should we also target spinning disk with a heavy preference for sequential access?
I mentioned doing some more performance work to Andrew, and he suggested Pass 1 parsing is not yet concurrent, which is a good point. At a guess, I think if we can parse different hprof segments concurrently, I think we can very efficiently parse large files across multiple cores. The tradeoff would be that this will be reading multiple different regions of the file separately and likely require physical seek on large volumes. On NVME/SSD this might be acceptable but I think for spinning disk this would be a large penalty.
I suspect the answer will come down to a tunable option, however the ideal to me requires only a single implementation rather than multiple implementations. For example, an ideal solution might be: if you have a spinning disk, parse in one thread, using the same algorithm as the multi threaded approach. The question then is, how do we detect for the user that we should use single threaded for the parsing phase in the event the user has multiple cores available.
Please let me know your thoughts and/or if you have any implementation suggestions.
Thanks
Jason
