Tweakable Optimisation

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

First read up on what a tweakable is. Your task is to automatically optimise the tweakables in a program to make it run quickly.

You do this by monitoring a program every time it is run. The program provides some measure of efficiency e.g. time to process a transaction, time per file, time per byte processed… You perturb the tweakables for each run. You collect a database of statistics. You then use a sort of multidimensional Newton-Raphson (similar to code use to numerically solve differential equations) to home in on the optimum values of the tweakables for that particular computer in that particular millieu.

This can be complicated by other factors e.g. how much of the CPU, RAM, disk is being hogged by other processes unrelated to the one being measured. The optimum tweakable depends on the environment.

Finally the optimum tweakables can vary over time for a long running program like Web server. Ideally you then want something to continually adjust the tweakables as the program runs to keep them optimal.

You must create generic interfaces for instrumenting a program that do not put a great burden of understanding on the application programmer.

You will need JNI to measure the environment the program is running in.

JNI
tweakable

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