81 items tagged “performance”
2008
simplejson 2.0.1. Python’s simplejson JSON library got a whole lot faster while I wasn’t looking. # 1st October 2008, 10:55 pm
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. # 11th September 2008, 4:06 pm
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. # 22nd August 2008, 11:13 pm
ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second. # 27th July 2008, 4:57 pm
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. # 3rd June 2008, 7:57 am
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. # 20th March 2008, 3:17 pm
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. # 11th March 2008, 5:42 am
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. # 11th February 2008, 10:05 pm
“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.
— John Resig # 11th February 2008, 5:31 am
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. # 7th January 2008, 9:26 pm
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. # 7th January 2008, 8:32 am
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. # 26th December 2007, 12:09 pm
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
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
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
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
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
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
Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour (via) Curse Gaming are getting impressive performance out of Django. # 24th May 2007, 4:11 pm
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
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