InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Profiling Just Got Easier With Perf4j
When you start to think about profiling Java applications, many tools come to mind - but did you think profiling could be as easy as adding logging statements? This is the goal of the Perf4j project.
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JRuby and Clojure - A Good Match?
Clojure is a JVM based LISP with interesting properties for concurrency (persistent data structures, STM). New libraries for Clojure are popping up - and some of them are inspired by Ruby libraries such as HAML, ActiveRecord, Rack, and others. We also look at combining JRuby and Clojure to get the best of both Ruby and LISP world, as well as access to technologies such as STM.
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Presentation: Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com
In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talked about administering thousands of web servers from a system’s architect viewpoint. He mostly detailed the performance counter monitoring used by MySpace, the system profiler and the system administration site demoing the tools for the audience to see how it works.
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Rubinius Progress - Interview with Brian Ford
The Ruby implementation Rubinius has attracted a lot of interest. After the project completed a major rewrite of its VM, we caught up with Brian Ford, Rubinius team member, to talk about the state of the project.
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Replacing the ThreadPool with Tasks, Continuations, and Futures
.NET 4 is adding support for tasks. Tasks are lightweight units of work much like queue work items, but with support for waits, continuations, and futures. Tasks can also support parent-child relationships with waits and cancellations being automatically threaded through them.
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Clojure Brings STM, LISP to the JVM
Clojure, a LISP-style language for the JVM, is gaining interest quickly. One of the reasons is definitely its approach to concurrency which builds on Software Transactional Memory (STM). We talked to Stuart Halloway who's writing the first book on Clojure for the Pragmatic Programmers.
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Article: Using the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
Nick Gunn provides a practical introduction Using the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime. CCR radically changes the way multi-threaded applications are written in .NET, shifting the focus from threads and locks to lightweight, asynchronous tasks. The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, also known as CCR, offers actor-style concurrency for .NET applications.
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Mono 2.2 Has a Linear Code Generation Engine
Until now Mono’s code generation engine was based on a tree Intermediate Representation (IR) of the code. Version 2.2 has a new engine based on a linear IR, which brings significant speed and code size improvements.
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Ruby 1.9.1 Is Close - Time To Switch From 1.8.x?
Ruby 1.9.1, the first stable version of Ruby 1.9 is around the corner, with the RC2 expected any day. 1.9.x hasn't seen much adoption or support in it's first year - although a closer look shows that it might be time to consider 1.9.1.
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New Patches for 1.8.x Fix Memory Leaks And Improve Performance
A few patches by Brent Roman promise to fix a long standing issue of memory leaks, particularly for continuations, for Ruby 1.8.x. They also happen to improve performance.
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Article: Performance Anti-Patterns in Database-Driven Applications
In this article, Alois Reitbauer, a Performance Architect for dynaTrace Software, specifies several architectural anti-patterns which can downgrade an application’s performance. Knowing those anti-patterns and proactively designing the application to avoid them will keep away certain snags that can impact application’s performance.
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Merb Will Be Merged Into Rails 3.0
Big news for Ruby web frameworks: Merb and Rails will be merged in Rails 3.0. The merge will bring some of Merb's characteristics to Rails: a defined public API, ability to run a barebones version rails-core (like merb-core) with further functionality available in the form of plugins, performance improvements and more.
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Presentation: Second Life’s Architecture
In this presentation, Ian Wilkes, VP of Systems Engineering, describes the architecture used by the popular game named Second Life. Ian presents how the architecture was at its debut and how it evolved over years as users and features have been added.
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Erlang Style Concurrency for .NET Applications Part 1 - CCR
Erlang allows for massively scalable concurrency, often with millions of lightweight, thread-like components known as actors. Unfortunately, using Erlang requires rewriting all of your legacy code into a rather esoteric language. But there are other options, such as the little known CCR platform that was developed by .NET's robotics department.
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Ruby Performance: Great Shootout Results And A Discovery About Binary MRI vs Source Compiled MRI
Antonio Cangiano has again benchmarked all Ruby VMs, MRI 1.8 and 1.9.1, REE, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby and MagLev. The results show the steady improvement of the performance of all VMs - and a few surprising lessons of how the performance of MRI can vary.