InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Visual Studio Dropping Support for Itanium
SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will be the last major versions to support Intel’s Itanium processor. While extended support will be offered for 8 years, new investments in the Itanium should be weighed carefully against AMD’s far more popular x64 architecture.
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JRuby Roundup: JRuby-Prof Allows Fast Profiling, JRuby::Synchronized for Automatic Synchronization
JRuby-Prof is a new, low overhead profiler for JRuby which, unlike plain Java profilers, will generate clear, Ruby-specific reports. A new feature in JRuby is JRuby::Synchronized, a module that, when extended, will make all methods of a class synchronized.
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Digg and Reddit Have Joined the NoSQL Camp
Both Digg and Reddit have announced their move to Cassandra this month because MySQL does not scale well enough for them. Some consider that MySQL + memcache is no longer the de facto scalability solution.
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GigaSpaces XAP 7.1 EA: Elastic Middleware, Data Querying and Spring 3.x
GigaSpaces XAP is a distributed application server with an in-memory data grid. The XAP 7.1 release includes a number of themes: an Elastic Middleware Service, enhanced virtualization compatibility, data querying, an updated web-based management application, embedded Spring 3.0, and performance improvements. InfoQ explored this EA release to learn more.
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Scaling Out the Most Popular Social Game, FarmVille
With 83.75 million monthly active users, FarmVille is the most popular game on Facebook and one of the most popular web-based games on the Internet. To scale out, the application is deployed inside the cloud, uses cache extensively, has the ability to turn off some of the functionality during peak times and makes use of performance monitoring and managing.
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Dynamic Language Roundup: Python's GIL Gets Overhauled but not Removed, Squeak Comes to Android
The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.
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ConcurrentDictionary, .NET 4.0’s New Thread-Safe Hashtable
The ConcurrentDictionary is a cornerstone in .NET 4.0’s greatly increased emphasis on parallel and concurrent programming. But while vastly superior to what we have seen in the past, it isn’t a panacea and developers need to study its semantics carefully.
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Sun Releases Java 6 Update 18 With Significant Performance Improvements and Windows 7 Support
Sun is updating Java 6 for the first time this year providing fixes for over 300 bugs, plus Windows 7 support, and a significant number of performance improvements. These include a 30%-40% performance gain when using the default Parallel Scavenger garbage collector on machines based on a NUMA architecture with Solaris or Linux as the OS.
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Ruby VM Roundup: 1.9.2 Gets DTrace Support, Rubinius 1.0 RC2 Adds Installers, IronRuby IDEs
Rubinius 1.0RC2 adds binary installers, while Ruby 1.9.2 will get DTrace support. IronRuby moves closer to 1.0 and SharpDevelop 3.1 gains IronRuby support. Also: WEBRick users should consider upgrading to the latest versions of Ruby 1.8.x and 1.9.1 because of a recently discovered vulnerability.
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Json.NET Claims Significant Performance Improvements over Other .NET Serializers
Json.NET is claiming to offer better serialization and deserialization performance than any of the major serializers in .NET including BinaryFormatter. It even performs well against the remarkably fast DataContractSerizalier.
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Clojure 1.1 Adds Transients, Chunked Sequences for Efficiency
Clojure 1.1 RC1 is out and cuts the overhead of functional programming with a few new constructs: transients bring controlled mutability for persistent data structures; chunked sequences make lazy sequences more efficient. InfoQ takes a look at what makes these improvements work.
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Executing Parallel Programs on Multi-core GPUs and CPUs with Accelerator V2
Accelerator V2, currently a preview build, is a .NET managed library easing the task of writing data-parallel programs executed on multi-core CPUs and GPUs.
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GWT 2.0 Comes with a New Performance Tool: Speed Tracer
GWT 2.0’s new features are: Speed Tracer – a performance analysis tool, Development Mode, UiBinder, Layout Panels and more JavaScript code size optimizations.
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8.8.8.8, A DNS Number for Faster Browsing
Google is offering two DNS servers for public use, namely 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, in an attempt to further speed up browsing.
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JRuby's New IR Paves the Way for Future Performance Improvements
A new intermediate representation (IR) for JRuby code enables many optimizations and could bring the next performance boost. InfoQ talked to Subbu Sastry who works on the IR.