had a nice reminder about some simple testing techniques with a stopwatch/log file timestamps.

we are working on a distributed webapp that includes normal ejb/sql persistence, an in-memory jena semwebby set of models (triples+1), and blaze rules.

with some creative use of killing the development server to clear memory, running code to clear tables, and including or excluding running rules, we had the makings of some simple macro-level tests.

what we found was that consecutive runs caused a linear growth over time. Hmmm.

well, “consistency is a quality all to itself” i always say! at least the performance issue can be tackled and measured and improvements can be detected.

Turn off rules. We found that running rules caused a discrete delta performance hit. Allowing the database to grow had negligible effects on performance.

two new issues in jira!

• keep the in-memory jena models cleaned up after their use is no longer required.
• examine performance issues around rules