Kirk is a Performance Consultant and has been focused on Object technologies and performance tuning for the last 15 years. Kirk is co-author of the book ANT Developer's Handbook (SAMS).

We all like puzzles and that is what this talk is all about, puzzles, Java, and performance. In this highly interactive talk we will look at a number of small benchmarks with interesting performance characteristics. In working through the puzzle we will discover how and why we've gotten the results that we have. You can think of it as a fun way to learn more about how the Java runtime environment works.