So, there are more than just a few rumors about the possible Apple Tablet and why wouldn’t there be a lot of buzz around the company that has a knack of delivering products that changes paradigms? I personally don’t think there will be one. Now, to be clear, I would very much like there to be one but one question keeps coming up for me. Where will the Apple Tablet fit into the company’s product line? A lot of buzz today seems to think that Amazon’s changing of the Kindle royalty fees to publishers is some indication of the iminent arrival of the iSlate. I can’t seem to connect the dots. How will Apple benefit from developing a tablet that would directly compete with the Kindle? Reading books on the iPhone or iPod touch are just as enjoyable. There is definitely a gap in the market for a tablet device, techies have been after it for years and let’s face it, who would be better to develop one than Apple? However, what is the market segment that this fit into?
Schools – Apple’s devices have never been cheap, hence I don’t see it replacing paper notebooks in the short term.
Business – Executives could walk around with their slick tablets and look ace in the boardroom but other than that, who in the organisation would benefit from a tablet? Assistants? Would the market be big enough? I may be being very short sighted here but are there any others who would benefit?
General Consumers – Why would home users choose a tablet over a laptop or a desktop? I wouldn’t, would you? Why? How will a tablet provide a better user experience?
The iPod and iPhone were part of the master plan for creating the AppStore and iTunes which are the real cash cows for Apple. Apple is happy on the desktop and laptop fronts because if they wanted to compete head to head with Microsoft or Dell they could be churning out low cost machines with the same awesome OS X. Although, they have cornered the design, music production, video production and now developer communities with their hardware. Where will the tablet fit and how will it benefit Apple?
Forget the hardware, what is Apple planning in the long run? This is the question that everyone should be asking. I guess on January 27th 2010 we’ll all find out.
Memory leaks with Coldfusion 8
For the past few weeks I’ve been incognito due to some memory leak issues we’ve been having with our new app. It is essentially a rewrite of our existing web application using Object Oriented techniques and embraces the Model-View-Controller paradigm. It really is a pretty little thing but unfortunately she crumbled under the weight of the world wide web. Anyone who has faced the memory leak problem will know that it is not an easy one to crack and it takes time to determine the exact issue. There are a lot of articles around that have excellent information which were all very helpful in my quest for a solution.
The system made a lot of use of the session and application scope for caching objects which was the first issue that we had to overcome. It seemed like a good idea, you’ve got loads of memory, you have a finite amount of objects that can be called for each session why not persist them. The problem is that ColdFusion 8 seems to have an issue with complex objects (i.e. CFCs) stored in the session and application scopes. The reason I say this is that we were seeing a very, very strange thing happening to the memory on our server. When load testing was run, the server was fine, the memory steadily increased until the initial sessions began expiring and then the average of memory usage plateaued, which is what you like to see. However, once the load test ended the memory steadily increased until it crashed the CF instance. Weird right? And so the search for a solution began. I came across a few helpful articles:
http://www.ghidinelli.com/2009/07/16/finding-memory-leaks-coldfusion-jvm
http://www.schierberl.com/cfblog/index.cfm/2006/10/12/ColdFusion_memoryLeak_profiler
http://www.alagad.com/blog/post.cfm/troubleshooting-coldfusion-performance-analysis-part-ii
These were tremendously helpful in assisting me in finding the solution. The last post from Alagad was the one that helped cure my issue in the end. You need to ensure that when making copies of persistent scoped variables that they are deep copied or used in a local scope within CFC functions. However, bear in mind that there are many causes for memory leaks and you should spend the time in figuring out the exact cause of your problem. I found the MAT tool supremely useful.
Here are some tips for curing memory issues:
Hopefully these will help someone else going forward.