Life has been just a touch busy recently having been flat out on various client projects pretty much over the whole summer (managed a week away but only just!). All grist to the mill for future blogging, so hopefully a variety of articles to come!

Meanwhile one of the things I was doing was preparing and then giving a presentation for the (first) Perforce European Conference on 19th September in central London.

I think the papers will be out pretty shortly on the Perforce site, but meanwhile a few highlights and personal notes. There were some big names present and it was good to hear about various practices and principles in operation.

Keynote

Christopher Seiwald did a variation on his slightly "aw shucks" style keynote. Some key points:

• Perforce doing fine: 200,000 users and 4,000 companies
• Company motto: "Aim low and hit!" (do one thing well, remain best of breed and wait for the analyst pendulum to swing back to best of breed rather than suite integration, which it seems to do on a regular basis)
• Working on a variety of things for future world domination, but don't want to pre-announce as usual
• Very pleased with the way things are happening in Europe, and obviously at the response to this event.
• Next US Conference 9 - 11 May 2007, Las Vegas.
• Sydney office now opened to give global timezone support coverage!

Symbian

Deepak Modgill did a nice presentation on the challanges faced by Symbian for their offshoring. Another in the Symbian series of how their business and vairous configuration management practices have evolved. Not deeply technical but interesting never-the-less.

SAP

Obviously a flagship site for Perforce. Thomas Kroll and Claudia Loff did a good presentation. Interesting how much process and tools they had wrapped around Perforce. A few key stats:

• 4,800 users
• 80+ Perforce servers (but all on same cluster hardware)
• Fujitsu Siemens clusters with 32Gb RAM running SunOS 9
• SAN (mirrored) for main data

They use a very structured process (repository structure and branching scheme) and a parallel (P4SAP) system with its own database to record things like changes and migrations (they call them transports) of releases between different servers. There is also a layer P4MS (Management System) to handle users etc.

Quite impressive.

Process Automation

Obviously my talk was wonderful! I was thought fairly pleased with how it went down and got some good comments afterwards. For anyone interested, the Ruby triggers framework and a couple of utilities are in my area of the Perforce Public Depot.

I will no doubt be blogging on various related aspects (that I haven't already touched on).

Bank of America

Good talk by Sean Cody and Kevin Breidenbach about different approaches with the bank. They have been replacing ClearCase with Perforce in various groups, mainly due to the performance for shared development between US, UK and India. Experience of Multisite sometimes taking hours to "sync up", vs. 10-20 minutes max in Perforce.

Another feature of the talk was the power of continuous integration.

Google

Dan Bloch discussed Google's use of Perforce and in particular how they manage issues around Perforce database locking and identifying and bumping off rogue commands.

Some more stats:

• 3,000+ users
• Single Perforce Repository
• HP DL585 4-way Opeteron with 128Gb RAM
• Linux 2.4 and NetApp filer

Sounds like it wins the contest for largest number of users against a single server!

The details of the lock identification was very interesting and Dan said he would be releasing the lock.pl script and some docs on the Public Depot real soon now!

Perforce 2006.1 Update

A very interesting and technical talk by Michael Shields regarding a variety of performance optimisations made between 2005.2 and 2006.1.

Summary: 2006.1 is quite a bit faster!

Read the slides for more details.

Laura Wingerd

Laura did another fairly technical talk on what has happened to the branching/merging algorithm, and more particularly common ancestor detection algorithm used in various releases of 2006.1. In her usual inimitable style she came up with some very useful ways of explaining things like convergence and divergence of branches over time. Things got decidedly more technical with discussions on common ancestors and I was left knowing I have to go through some of this in detail in a quiet moment just to make sure I really do understand it! The changes with 2006.1 look good, but I did get the impression some edge cases could give some slightly surprising results if you don't know what's going on behind the covers (and indeed the driving intentions behind the algorithm).

Summary

Venue worked very well for location. Networking with both Perforce people and various other delegates was as ever a highlight.

Unfortunately the room booked was not huge which meant the event sold out well ahead of time - a shame a more flexible venue wasn't chosen, but that was only quibble. Organisation well run.

An excellent day!