Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ruby 1.9—Right for You? Dave Thomas on the just-released Ruby 1.9. It’s a development release that breaks backwards compatibility in a few minor ways, but new features include the YARV virtual machine (hence significant speed improvements) and unicode support via associating encodings with bytestrings.

# 26th December 2007, 12:09 pm / bytestrings, dave-thomas, performance, rubi19, ruby, unicode, yarv

ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware.

# 10th December 2007, 3:27 pm / amazon, benchmarks, ec2, erlang, erlyweb, performance, rails, virtualisation, yarivsadan

Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page.

# 16th November 2007, 3:58 pm / ajaxian, javascript, performance, yahoo, yahoosearch

CSS Sprite Generator (via) Upload a zip file of images and get back a CSS sprite plus a set of pre-calculated background image rules. Tool built by Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville for their forthcoming book “High Performance Web Site Techniques”.

# 27th September 2007, 10:59 pm / css, csssprites, ed-eliot, performance, spritegenerator, stuart-colville

YSlow. New extension for Firebug (yes, an extension on top of another extension) from the Yahoo! performance team which provides improved performance measurement tools and optimisation advice.

# 25th July 2007, 4:48 am / extension, firebug, firefox, http, optimisation, performance, yahoo, yslow

Return of the HTTP overhead delay. Christian proposes a neat way of improving page performance, by delaying non-essential images such as avatars until after the rest of the page has loaded.

# 11th July 2007, 3:12 pm / avatars, christian-heilmann, http, images, javascript, onload, performance

Reducing HTTP requests using make. Nice simple recipe for concatenating JavaScript in to one file using make—doesn’t do anything for cache-busting though.

# 27th May 2007, 11:29 pm / javascript, make, performance

Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour (via) Curse Gaming are getting impressive performance out of Django.

# 24th May 2007, 4:11 pm / curse, cursegaming, django, performance, scaling

Content delivery system design mistakes. Collection of tips for optimising Web server performance. Mentions lighttpd/nginx, Keep-Alive, expires headers, noatime and more.

# 15th February 2007, 11 am / http, lighttpd, nginx, performance

Browser Cache Usage—Exposed! Includes real numbers for browser cache usage on some of Yahoo!’s most popular pages.

# 7th January 2007, 10:20 pm / cache, performance, yahoo