Apache Archiva 1.3.3 released: performance improvements!

If you’re using Archiva for your repository management needs, you should definitely upgrade to the latest release. Download it now!

The 1.3.x series has focused on the biggest offenders in memory usage and performance problems, and Archiva 1.3.3 brings the biggest improvements yet:

• Full scans should take about 1/3rd of the time and consume far less memory
• Removed one-off memory hits at the end of a scan
• File descriptor use during concurrent deployments are better managed

In addition, a new system status page is available for assessing the cause of potential performance issues at runtime, giving better insight into how to tune memory or scanning settings appropriately.

This work is in advance of the upcoming Archiva 1.4 release which has revived the internals more significantly, with further performance improvements and a series of new features.

It’s also worth noting that we dropped support for Archiva 1.1.x and Archiva 1.2.x in November, so there’s no reason left to remain on older versions.

I’d like to thank YourKit, who provided a free license for their profiler, which was of great assistance in tracking down these issues. I’ve used it on occasion for a number of years, and it is one of the easiest tools to use that I’ve ever encountered.

The full set of issues resolved follow:

• [MRM-1097] – Error 500 "too many open files"
• [MRM-1369] – Editing user roles in archiva clobbers continuum redback roles
• [MRM-1396] – Purge task problem : Not enough parts to the path
• [MRM-1421] – Archiva repository purge incorrectly purges based on file timestamps even when the snapshot timestamp is known
• [MRM-1443] – repository statistics collection can cause server to hang
• [MRM-1416] – upgrade to Redback 1.2.5
• [MRM-1439] – improve indexing performance
• [MRM-1440] – system status page
• [MRM-1441] – monitor repository scanning progress
• [MRM-1442] – track time spent in each consumer during a scan, to help diagnose poor scanning performance
• [MRM-1445] – disable referrer check by default

Apache Archiva 1.3 release and what’s next

In the midst of a busy couple of weeks, I neglected to post about the Archiva 1.3 release that was announced recently (and on that topic, Continuum has posted a new beta release as well).

The Archiva release focused mostly on bugfixes (particularly for indexing and LDAP), but we decided it was worthy of a version bump after the addition of an upload audit logging feature and some decent performance improvements. It’s an easy upgrade for 1.2 users – if you keep your configuration separate, then just unzip the new version and start it up using the same environment variables as you would the previous version.

Archiva is also easy to try out if you already have a Maven repository – its primary storage is the filesystem in a Maven repository format, so you can point it at a copy and everything will be available straight away (gradually indexing resources for access through the UI in the background).

As for what’s next – while it’s still to be put to vote, I hope that the next version will be based on the work I started again last year and have had in mind since almost the beginning of the project. This focuses on two underlying aspects: the removal of the archiva database requirement and the transformation to be an extensible metadata repository.

I always refer to the database removal as “Back to the Future”, since it is similar to the design pre-1.0 where Lucene was used to store all of the information, however in this case I had the opportunity to learn from our experiences and build on a more appropriate foundation:

• A central, extensible metadata model that allows storage of any different repository , artifact, or resource type;
• Delegating repository requests, to better facilitate repository grouping and proxying when configured, and to allow metadata to be regenerated from the storage on the fly;
• Decomposing functionality into plugins so that optional portions can be removed. Plugins operate on metadata, certain repository events and a few other extension points. This remains a work in progress, but the aim is to allow reducing the deployable application to as little as a simple maven proxy cache for your local machine with a very low footprint, and to make it easy and robust to write and use a combination of different plugins.

At the moment, these changes are all under the hood – apart from configuration there is no visible difference other than the number of bugs that got removed along the way! However, the decoupling will make way for easier development of new features and the opportunity for much needed advances in the UI.

Book Released – Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation

After being available in “RAW” (draft) form for the last few months, the final release of Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation is now available online! It is available in both eBook and printed + eBook versions.

We had some specific goals in writing this that I think we’ve achieved:

• It is intended to build on top of knowledge from the free books that have gone before it with minimal duplication – though still enough information to stand alone.
• The book should be of most value to intermediate Maven users, but also useful to beginners. Everyone should learn something from it. It should update Maven 2.0 users on the latest available technology such as Maven 2.2, the newer Archetype creation from a project mechanism, and under-utilised plugins like the Enforcer or Shade plugins.
• We wanted to focus on “best practices” and tying everything together in a way that shows how Maven was meant to be used. Hopefully readers will experience the occasional “aha!” moment.
• The book works through the issues by a gradual example application, like building up (or applying Maven to) your own project. It intends to show how a reasonably complete project structure is best worked with, and the example application should be relatively interesting in its own right. It gets built from scratch, up to an assembly, building it in CI, deploying it to the repository, and releasing it.
• We wanted to give some coverage to Archiva and Continuum (projects that we’ve both been involved in for some time) to illustrate team concepts, but also convey the concepts in a way that translates to other equivalent tools.

You can see what was covered in the Table of Contents.

The book eventually weighed in at 450 pages – far more than we’d intended when we set out, though still with plenty of potential topics to cover. When we started this just over a year ago, my thoughts had initially been around simply covering the content from my series of Maven presentations and training content in book form, but soon found we could expand on many of the topics.

I had the good fortune to work with Deng Ching on the book (her announcement is on her blog), who poured a number of weekends and evenings into writing half of the content and reading (and re-reading) my writing.

We had some great help from our reviewers – Carsten Ziegler, Wendy Smoak and Emmanuel Venisse, as well as the encouragement of several others who wanted to help but couldn’t commit the time. Thank you all!

Apache Archiva goes live!

Archiva became a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation in March, and we’re now rounding out the move of some of the resources. The web site has moved to http://archiva.apache.org/, and the mailing lists have moved to the same domain.

The project continues to grow – we’ve just added our first committer as a standalone project (welcome, James!). Another release is also now just around the corner with much improved HTTP and WebDAV support, performance and memory improvements, and popular feature requests such as RSS and repository groups are just being rounded out.

Apache Archiva 1.0.2 Released

The Archiva team has just released Archiva 1.0.2. You can find out about it in the release notes – 41 fixes in all.

It’s a busy time coming up – Archiva is now a top level project at the ASF, and we are in the process of moving the infrastructure across. A pre-release of 1.1 will hot on the heels of this release, which includes several new features including some performance and memory improvements.

Have some ideas for how to improve repository management? Why not get involved today!