InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Exploring Tuple Spaces Persistence In Ruby With Blackboard
Ruby has long been criticized for 1.8's limited green threads. Luc Castera gave a presentation at RubyNation about Concurrent Programming with Ruby and Tuple Spaces. He introduces 2 ways of implementing TupleSpaces in Ruby: Rinda and Blackboard using Redis (with plans to porting it to Erlang).
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MacRuby Drops GIL, Gains Concurrent Threads
MacRuby joins the ranks of JRuby and IronRuby and moved away from Ruby 1.9's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental branch.
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Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009.
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Google Calls for a Joint Effort to Speed Up the Internet
After open sourcing Page Speed a few weeks ago, Google has launched a web site in an attempt to find ways and push the speed up process of the entire Internet. Google shares research data, web site speed optimization tutorials, recorded presentations, links to lots of performance optimization tools, and a discussion group inviting everyone to share ideas on how to make the web faster.
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Windows 7’s Graphics Engine Wants to be Better than Vista’s
The Windows 7 graphics engine changes the way DWM, introduced with Vista, works, it also comes with new APIs, D2D and DWrite, a new Direct3D 11, and better handling of multiple output devices.
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JRuby Roundup: JRuby 1.3 Released, ruby2java, JSR 292 Progress
JRuby 1.3 is now available, bringing performance improvements and compatibility with Google AppEngine. Work on other improvements is continuing and a first version of the ruby2java compiler is now available. Also: InvokeDynamic support is making it's way into the builds for the next Java version.
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Google Has Open Sourced Page Speed
Google has just open sourced Page Speed, a tool used internally by Google to optimize their web sites, especially the speed web pages are loaded with.
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Sun Clarifies on the G1 Garbage Collector Licensing Controversy
A couple of days ago InfoQ posted an article about the fact that the release notes for G1 in the latest Java update, mandated that it was to be used in production only by organizations with a Sun support contract. Following the debate and the reactions that where raised in the community, Sun has explicitly updated the release notes and has removed the controversial clause.
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Is Sun offering the new G1 Garbage Collector Only with a Paid Support Contract?
Sun's Garbage First garbage collector (nicknamed G1) has been released with Java Update 1.6.0_14 (6u14). Although this low pause, server style collector has been long awaited by the developer's community, at this point Sun allows production usage only to paying customers and this has raised concerns.
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Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation
In this interview from QCon London 2009, Rich Hickey talks about Clojure. The discussion includes the ideas behind Clojure's STM support, what other concurrency primitives Clojure supports and which ones might get added in the future. Other topics covered are Clojure's AOT support, the role and implementation of multimethods, Clojure ports to other systems and much more.
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Performance Roundup: Heap Stacks Boost Threads in 1.8.x, MacRuby AOT, ZenProfile and EventHooks
New patches by Joe Damato improve the efficiency of Ruby 1.8.x's green threads with heap stacks: instead of copying the entire stack at every context switch, the patches actually switch between different stacks. Ryan Davis released zenprofile and event_hook for efficient profiling. Also: work on a MacRuby Ahead of Time compiler using LLVM has started.
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Flex: Engine Yard's New Cloud Offering
Engine Yard announced Flex at this year's Rails Conf. Flex runs on Amazon's EC2, but unlike its smaller brother Solo, Flex scales over more than one instance. We talked to Michael Mullany, VP of Marketing at Engine Yard to get more information.
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Erlang and Ruby Roundup: 37Signals, Erlectricity
37Signals is the latest company to use Erlang in combination with Ruby. The recent Erlang Factory conference also had other examples of Erlang use at EngineYard as well as a talk about Erlectricity, the library that connects Erlang and Ruby.
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8 Best Practices to Improve Scalability
Wille Faler proposes 8 scalability and performance best practices like offloading the database, using caching, minimizing network traffic and others.
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Ruby Performance Roundup: Ruby 1.9.1 Real World Performance, GC vs EventMachine, Ruby Compiler
When it comes to performance, Ruby 1.9.1 seems to clearly beat it's predecessor, as a new real world benchmark shows. There are other ways, though, to avoid inefficiencies in 1.8.x, by knowing how the GC works or when to disable pthreads. Also: Viktor Hokstad's been busy writing a Ruby compiler from scratch.