The December issue of the Java Performance Newsletter was published, contents are:

• We list all the latest Java performance related news and articles
  • "we've only been building up steam on the Java steamroller. The real ride is only just starting. Whoopee, it's full steam ahead!"
• The roundup of performance discussions over the last month. Kirk covers when to use PL/SQL, a "semi-deployed" system, time syncing distributed systems, and more
  • "whenever a thread drifts at Java Gaming, it's always for the better"
• Javva The Hutt is on holiday
  • "A pittance would be a fortune compared to what we get."
• This month's interview with Jayson Falkner, Mr. JSP
  • "Here are the best tricks I use: #1 Database Connection Pooling; #2 Don't read flat files from the hard disk; #3 Server-Side Caching; ..."
• Question of the Month asks about the -Xprof HotSpot profiler
  • "is -Xprof useful? Yes, after all you are getting some profiling information for almost nothing"
• Our new cartoon section by "profiler". This month: Speeding up the hardware

Okay, I had nine responses to last month's question about about the appropriateness of these announcements. Seven were positive, indicating that I should carry on announcing the availability of the JavaPerformanceTuning.com newsletter, one was neutral, and one negativish. In fact, the main feedback outside "carry on" was that I should put some additional content along with the announcement. Which seems fair enough. So I'll have a go at giving you some opinions in addition to the announcement in future. Meanwhile, here are some stats.

To put those nine active responses into context, the November announcement was read about 800 times up to now, and generated about the same number of reads on to the JavaPerformanceTuning.com newsletter. The November newsletter pages were read about 10 000 times (back copies were read another 7 000 times during December). And for those of you who are interested, our most popular single newsletter page to date was the June 2003 page detailing new performance tips extracted from JavaOne 2003, which has now been read 23 000 times.

JavaPerformanceTuning.com gets hits from all round the world. The last time I looked, we had about a third of our traffic coming from the USA, a third from Europe, and a third from everywhere else. So can you guess which day over the year was the quietest in terms of traffic? ... Take a moment, think about it and try not to peek ahead ... okay, well the answer is the first of January. I guess that's the most popular day worldwide for a hangover. And for the two hundred or so sober web denizens who looked up pages on JavaPerformanceTuning.com last Jan 1st, I'll be joining you tomorrow as I did last year, since I don't get the day off either.