performance – rc3.org

Tag: performance

HipHop is an accelerator for PHP from Facebook

Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.

Facebook developer Haiping Zhao announces HipHop for PHP, a tool that translates PHP to C++ and compiles it using g++.

Links for August 31

August 31, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

MySQL Performance Blog: Give me 8 hours, and I’ll help you build a better application. Three simple things you should to to make your applications more robust.
Andrew Sullivan: The Rotten Core. As Alasdair Gray said, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
Foreign Policy: Think Again: Africa’s Crisis. Things aren’t as bad in Africa as you think. This is a short article that sheds lights on a lot of popular misconceptions.
Amateur Gourmet: Dinner at El Bulli. The closest I’ll ever come to eating there, except perhaps when I watched Decoding Ferran Adria.
Business Week: Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?. An argument that job creation has stalled due to a lack of basic research.
Financial Times: The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil. Absolutely brilliant feature on an Iraqi petroleum geologist who emigrated to Norway in 1968 to get proper health care for his daughter and walked into the opportunity of a lifetime.

Links from June 8th

June 8, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Salon: The Learjet repo man. Just an entertaining article.
Dahlia Lithwick: Guantanamo is the least of America’s prison problem. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
Marginal Revolution: Why U.S. health care policy is especially egalitarian. Guaranteed to undermine at least one thing you believe to be true.
crontab2english. Stop trying to wrap your brain around cron configuration.
McClatchy: Why’d Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic. Make of this what you will.
MySQL Performance Blog: A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes. Helpful.
Ruby Best Practices: Reading Ruby’s Standard Library for Fun and Profit. Solid article on reading code.
WoW Insider: Beware of Blood Elves selling mounts. A complex phishing and identity theft scam in World of Warcraft. They used to say that all Web innovations begin on porn sites. I think you can look to World of Warcraft to see tomorrow’s fraud today.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed. Google’s version of YSlow.
O’Reilly Radar: TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker. Tracking changes to the terms of service from popular sites.
Elder Game: Yes, the MMO Industry Really is That Bad. Cautionary tale on working in the MMO industry.
Monica Youn: Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place. Useful context for the "wise Latina" speech.
YouTube: R.E.M. 10/10/82 The Pier, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Old footage someone dug up. For more information on the Village Subway, see this excellent post from Goodnight, Raleigh.
High Performance Web Sites: Using Iframes Sparingly. The performance of iframes is really bad.
O’Reilly Radar: Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search. Particularly interesting in light of the recent release of Wolfram Alpha.

Links from May 20

May 20, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Long delayed roundup of links:

Dan Benjamin: Top 10 Programming Fonts. I’m currently giving Inconsolata a whirl.
Jasmin Blanchette: The Little Manual of API Design. A very interesting looking PDF that I intend to read.
John Quiggin: Austrian Business Cycle Theory. A very well written critique.
Advanced NFL Stats: Draft Success by Team. Not enough attention is paid to the long term results of the draft.
James Carr: TDD Anti-Patterns. I’m a sucker for lists like this.
Firediff. A diff plugin for Firebug.
Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: Ending The ga.js Wait.Using Dojo to address some of the problems with ga.js, the JavaScript file used by Google Analytics.
Eliot Spitzer: If Judge Posner believes this, the world really has changed – One of the most prominent free market intellectuals thinks the market is incapable of setting CEO pay. Judge Posner has gone on to say many even more provocative things lately. This week he’s guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan.
AisleOne: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Design. Very good article on improving your use of type.
James Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers. Tips for conference speakers.
Ajaxian: FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP. A means of packaging debug information for Firebug to consume with AJAX responses.
LearnHub: How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!). DNS performance is an underrated piece of the overall site performance picture.
Seed Magazine: Getting Past the Pie Chart. On the state of data visualization.
USA Today: Announcing baseball’s all-stars in the broadcast booth. Ranking the baseball broadcasters.
A.V. Club: Turn off the shuffle: 25 great albums that work best when listened to from start to finish.
Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008. The results are interesting, but what I really like is the CSS used to create the charts.
Web Style Guide 3. Filing this away for later.
Chad Fowler: 20 Rails Development No-No’s. Compiled from responses to a request for feedback on Twitter.
Last.fm Blog: Mapreduce Bash Script. Very elegant hack.
Migrating from svn to a distributed VCS. This is specific to the Python code base, but it is a great general resource.
Digg the Blog: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. Something I need to digest.
Patrick Peak and Paul Barry: Presentation on BrowserCMS. It’s an up and coming CMS built using Ruby on Rails.
Rogers Cadenhead: Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain. On the risks of relying on the technical governance of an authoritarian dictatorship.
dotfiles.org: .zshrc. A collection of zsh init scripts.
UXmatters: Refining Data Tables. Tips on creating usable reports.
Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions. From my recent zsh obsession.
Fried CPU: zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!. zsh advocacy.
2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment. This is where I got the idea to try zsh in the first place.
Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline . An amazing set of photos.
James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. This happens to me all the time.
Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. Very much applicable to software development.
Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. Who doesn’t want to confit their own duck?

Links from March 12th

March 12, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Kurt Cagle: Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? The real question being asked is whether the features associated with dynamic database-driven Web sites are more compelling than the pinpoint control and top notch user experience of Dreamweaver.
Pathfinder Development: Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date. Managing dependencies is generally one of the most unpleasant aspects of any software development project.
Eric Burke: Ban Software Patents. Yet another example of ludicrous patents.
Michael Ruhlman: Michael Symon’s Pickled Chillis. Really cool recipe.
Serial Consign: Desktop Deja Vu. The history of the default desktop picture that shipped with Windows XP.
useum: Measuring Social Participation in a Science Museum. Useful for more than just museums.
Wired: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Looks fascinating but I’m not reading it ’til my Wired comes in the mail.
High Performance Web Sites: Performance Impact of CSS Selectors. Hard numbers on the varying performance of different CSS selectors. Also a reminder that there’s a lot more we could be measuring that we don’t.
oobject: formula 1 user interfaces. Incredibly fascinating comparison of the current state of steering wheels in Formula 1 cars.
PC Pro Blog: I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying. Another argument that high end page-based authoring tools are giving way to Drupal.

Usability and performance, part 1

April 17, 2008 / Rafe / 4 Comments

I’ve started collecting screen shots that illustrate the problem of performance issues affecting the usability of Web sites. I saw this one in a shopping cart from an online store (I don’t remember which one, and they probably wouldn’t want to be identified anyway).

As you can see, this text was added to the Web page because the “add to cart” request takes a long time to process. To prevent users from adding duplicate items to their cart, the Web site warns the user to keep waiting rather than pressing the button again.

The proper approach would be to improve the shopping cart so that adding items doesn’t take so long, or to find a more robust hosting provider, but those alternatives are more work and more expensive. I’d be willing to bet that the people running the site are using third party software that they can’t fix even if they want to.

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