InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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WordPress has Gone Live on Windows Azure
On Tuesday Microsoft announced that Windows Azure would support the LAMP stack, well perhaps “the -AMP stack” is a better term. With Linux out of the picture, Microsoft is courting developers building on top of Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python including the users of the wildly popular WordPress blogging software.
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ORM Profiling Tools for the .NET Platform
Sadly the terms “ORM” and “performance problems” often travel together. By hiding the underlying SQL from the developers, ORMs can offer a huge productivity boost. Unfortunately they also make it easy to generate ridiculously bad queries without realizing it. And without stored procedures to cross reference, finding the offending code without an ORM-specific profiler can be quite tricky.
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Beta 2 Brings Refinements to .NET’s Coordination Data Structures Library
Coordination Data Structures (CDS) is designed both to be used directly and to act as the building blocks for more complex concurrency frameworks. It includes advanced synchronization tools like the Barrier, several thread-safe collections, and a couple different ways to create futures.
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Google Works on a Protocol Intended to Replace HTTP
Google proposes SPDY, a new application protocol running on top of SSL, a protocol to replace HTTP which is considered to introduce latencies. They have already created a prototype with a web server and an enhanced Chrome browser that supposedly loads web pages twice as fast.
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Introducing the Task Parallel Library’s new Cancellation Framework
Task Parallel Library, .NET 4.0’s replacement for ThreadPool, got a face lift for beta 2. In addition to performance improvements, it The most important change is probably the new cancellation framework that replaces parent/child relationships with cancellation tokens that can be freely given to logical groups of tasks.
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BERT as Dynamic Alternative to Protocol Buffers/Thrift
Google's ProtocolBuffers and Facebook's Thrift are options for binary serialization, but not ones that pleased the GitHub team - so they created BERT/BERT-RPC based on the Erlang's 'external term format'. BERT/BERT-RPC now power parts of Github's internal communication.
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NewRelic RPM 2 Adds Java Support for Performance Monitoring
NewRelic just released RPM 2, the latest version of their performance monitoring software. RPM, which is available as SaaS (Software as a Service) now supports monitoring Java web/JEE applications as well as Ruby on Rails applications. We talked to NewRelic's Lew Cirne about the new release.
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MacRuby 0.5 Beta Brings JIT, AOT, GCD Support, Removes GIL
The first beta of MacRuby 0.5 is available, complete with a new VM, JIT and AOT - and without the GIL. InfoQ talked to the MacRuby core team about the state of MacRuby and whether there'll be a way to write Ruby apps for the iPhone using MacRuby.
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New Features and Performance Improvements for System.IO
Microsoft is planning some simple but much welcomed performance improvements for the core System.IO functionality. These include convenience methods for reading and writing text-based files, significantly faster directory enumeration, and support for memory mapped files.
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MySpace Explains How They Use the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
Currently MySpace is using CCR on 1,200 middle-tier caching servers, 3,000 web servers, and countless other related projects. In a Channel 9 interview, Principal Architect Erik Nelson and Senior Architect Akash Patel explain how CCR fits into MySpace’s core architecture.
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New Ruby Enterprise Edition Release Switches to Ruby 1.8.7
A new release of the Ruby Enterprise Edition switches from Ruby 1.8.6 to Ruby 1.8.7 and includes patches that significantly improve performance, as Evan Weaver from Twitter confirms.
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The DLR’s Adaptive Compiler
The Dynamic Language Runtime has significant performance improvements over traditional interpreters for Python and Ruby, once it is warned up. But for code you only use once or twice, the performance can be downright pitiful. Fortunately a solution is in sight.
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SPEC for SOA
Until recently there was no standardized way in which to measure the performance of SOA infrastructures, such as ESBs. Now the Spec Organization have announced that they are working with vendors to define just such a benchmark.
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Empower Your Ruby With Haskell And Hubris
Embedding C in Ruby or Rails applications is a way to fix performance bottle necks. RubyInline made this easy for C. Mark Wotton recently created Hubris, a bridge which makes it possible to call Haskell code from Ruby.
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Is the NoSQL Meeting Announcing the End of the RDBMS Era?
The NoSQL meeting tried to raise the awareness towards the opportunity of using non-relational databases which promise to be cheaper, simpler to administer and maintain, and offering superior scalability. Michael Stonebraker, co-creator of Ingres and Postgres, thinks that the end of RDBMS era is close, while others think that we are not there yet.