Andrew Siwko’s Blog #2

You are given nine coins and a balance scale (you can accurately compare
the weight of two things). The coins are indistinguishable except by
weight. One is lighter than the other eight. What is the fewest number
of weighings you would require to identify the one coin.

A customer has a p690 with 32 processors and 32 Gig of RAM. Two of his
engineers are arguing over how many copies of the applicaiton server to
run on the machine. The application has proven to scale well but session
persistence has shown a small overhead when used with no session affinity.
There are no other applications running on this machine to compete for
resources. One engineer wants to create one big JVM with 32 Gig of RAM
assigned as max heap (assume this is possible, tell me why if it isnt).
The other wants to create 32 JVMs, one for each CPU.

What is your advice?
What are their arguments?

When


When I write myself a socket listener which returns a string of
information when connected to and run it on WebSphere 3.5 on Windows and
on the Mainframe, I get different results. The mainframe version gives me
EBCDIC output.
How are Strings encoded inside a JVM in an IBM mainframe? What code page is
used internally?