The “stable 0″ release of the upcoming Terracotta 2.6 release is now available! For us, “stable 0″ means the first feature-complete build that is testing our first level of integration tests. We’ve still got a bunch of clean up, testing, performance verification, and other gates to hit before the official release, but if you want to be on the bleeding edge or give us early feedback, this is a good time to do it.

This release has a heavy emphasis on performance and stability and also includes a whole slew of visualization and management improvements. Here’s a high-level of what’s included:

• Next gen Health checker for L1-L2 connections and L2 connections
• String intern now works properly across nodes
• Dynamic String compression for large strings preventing wasted space for unread strings in receiver nodes
• Bunch of new stats in the admin console and snapshots
• Ability to take snapshots of a running systems stats and send them for analysis
• Cluster wide thread dumping from console
• New optimizations around locks
• New optimizations around all maps
• Improved read concurrency
• Improved performance for Network HA
• Improved startup performance in disk based failover
• New first gen mechanism for sharing objects between webapps and straight java apps via naming System classloader.

And you can see some JIRA issues too, if you want some more details.

We don’t have an official release date for 2.6 yet but we’re definitely in the end game. Any feedback is greatly appreciated as always!