85 items tagged “performance”
2009
ProjectPlan—unladen-swallow. A branch of Python 2.6 aiming to radically improve performance (the target is a 5x improvement), by compiling Python to machine code using LLVM’s JIT engine. I think this is a Google 20% time project (or maybe not, see the comments). An early version without LLVM is already available for download.
Magic properties make Firefox synchronously load the Java plugin. Even defining a function called sun() (or several other symbols) will trigger the Java VM to be loaded, dramatically hurting the performance of your page.
jQuery 1.3.1 Released. Bug fix for 1.3, mainly browser compatibility issues. Of interest: jQuery no longer ship a packed version (where JS is used to further decompress a string), as their tests show that this reduces performance due to the overhead of the extra decompression. They still provide a YUI Compressor minified version.
Sloppy—the slow proxy. Java Web Start GUI application which runs a proxy to the site of your choice simulating lower connection speeds—great for testing how well your ajax holds up under poor network conditions.
2008
simplejson 2.0.1. Python’s simplejson JSON library got a whole lot faster while I wasn’t looking.
Dromaeo: JavaScript Performance Testing (via) This is one classy benchmark. Run it in as many browsers as you like (each run is saved to the server and assigned a run ID), then compare the results by appending ?id=[run1],[run2]... to the URL.
TraceMonkey. Brendan Eich has been preaching the performance benefits of tracing and JIT for JavaScript on the conference circuit for at least a year, and the results from the first effort to be merged in to Mozilla core are indeed pretty astounding.
ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second.
SquirrelFish. WebKit’s JavaScript engine was no slouch, but that hasn’t stopped them from replacing it with a brand new “register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”. It runs 1.6x faster and has the Best Logo Ever.
Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs. 20 new performance tips to join the previously published 14. Flushing the buffer while the backend code is still working to cause the browser to start loading CSS earlier is interesting.
IE8 speeds things up. Steve Souders notes that IE8 downloads script files in parallel before executing them sequentially, giving it a significant speed boost over other browsers that download sequentially.
Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost! Ilya Grigorik wrote up my current favourite nginx trick—you set nginx to check memcached for a cache entry matching the current URL on every hit, then invalidate your cache by pushing a new cache record straight in to memcached from your application server.
"Why doesn't jQuery have an XPath CSS Selector implementation?" For now, my answer is: I don't want two selector implementations - it makes the code base significantly harder to maintain, increases the number of possible cross-browser bugs, and drastically increases the filesize of the resulting download.
Announcing StaticGenerator for Django. Simple but powerful static file generator for Django applications—just tell it about your model instances and it will create an entire static site based on calling get_absolute_url() on each one. Uses signals to repopulate the cache when a model changes.
20,000 Reasons Why Comet Scales. Greg Wilkins coaxes Jetty and Bayeux in to supporting 20,000 simultaneous users per server while maintaining sub-second latency, using Amazon EC2 to run the benchmark.
2007
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour (via) Curse Gaming are getting impressive performance out of Django.
Content delivery system design mistakes. Collection of tips for optimising Web server performance. Mentions lighttpd/nginx, Keep-Alive, expires headers, noatime and more.
Browser Cache Usage—Exposed! Includes real numbers for browser cache usage on some of Yahoo!’s most popular pages.