InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Free ADO.NET Performance Improvements in .NET 2.0 SP 1
Service Pack 1 for .NET 2.0 includes significant performance improvements for ADO.NET. We say they improvements are free because the changes do not require recompiling the code, any user installing the service pack should see at least some gains.
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Second Life Now Running Mono Trials
The popular virtual world Second Life is now publicly testing a Mono viewer. When in a Mono region, this viewer allows LSL scripts to be compiled against Mono. In theory, this will provide reduced lag and improved stability for Second Life users. According to Linden Labs, early results are promising.
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The Grinder 3.0: "The Programmer's Load Tester" Adds Scripting Support
The Grinder is an open source Java load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines. Its new release brings significant enhancements including integration with a scripting engine (Jython) that allows flexible test recording, script customization and replay.
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Presentation: Mongrel, 2500 Lines, and Economics
In this presentation from QCon London Zed Shaw talks about lesions learned while developing Mongrel. Topics include economics, project management and how companies can interact with open source projects. The talk also goes into the reasons of Mongrel's continued success.
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Article: Ruby Concurrency, Actors, and Rubinius - Interview with MenTaLguY
Actors, Fibers/Coroutines, Rubinius' Multi-VM and other Concurrency topics have come up recently. To put all these concepts into perspective, we talked to Ruby's MenTaLguY, who's been working on Ruby fastthread, Ruby Actors implementations, Rubinius, and much more. Also: a glimpse at MenTaLguY's next project.
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Comet: Sub-Second Latency with 10K+ Concurrent Users
Comet - technology that allows a sever to send over HTTP a message to the client when an event occurs, without the client having to explicitly request it - has been considered by some to scale poorly in the past. Recent tests using Cometd and Jetty as well as Lightstreamer production implementations prove the opposite.
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Skynet, A New Ruby MapReduce
The MapReduce design pattern to distribute data processing was introduced by Google in 2004, and came first with a C++ implementation. A new Ruby implementation is now available under the name of Skynet released by Adam Pisoni. InfoQ had the chance to catch up with Adam about its features and how it compares to an existing Ruby implementation called Starfish.
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Is XMPP the Future of Cloud Services?
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) has proven itself as a winner for instant messaging, but could it also be the protocol of choice for service integration in the future?
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Introducing Windows HPC Server 2008
A new version of the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, rebranded as Windows HPC Server 2008, is in the works. This adds a host of monitoring and configuration tools on top of Microsoft's MPI 2 based clustering technology.
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Inside the full speed Rubinius debugger
Debugging Ruby code just got much faster - at least with Rubinius. Unlike the debuggers for MRI or JRuby, the Rubinius full speed debugger allows programs to run at normal speed while they're debugged. We take a look at how the Rubinius VM's transparent design made this possible.
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MPI for .NET
MPI or Message Passing Interface is the standard for distributed programming such as that used in supercomputers and implementations can be found for FORTRAN, C, and C++. There are several projects in the works to bring that power to .NET. Today we look at two of them.
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Rubinius adds Multi-VM support
Rubinius adds a new feature called "Multi-VM", which allows to run multiple Ruby VMs inside an OS process. We talked with Evan Phoenix of the Rubinius project about the benefits and implementation of this feature.
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Presentation: Leveraging the Web for Services at Yahoo!
In a presentation recorded at QCon, Mark Nottingham, a "Principal Technical Yahoo!", provided some insight into how the Yahoo! Media Group uses the Web, and not Web services, to build its SOA variant. According to Mark, the Yahoo! Media Group gains significant advantages by using HTTP RESTfully, especially by exploiting caching opportunities.
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Consistency vs. availability: eventual consistency by Werner Vogels
Until the mid nineties, achieving distribution transparency and data consistency has often been the priority. As large Internet systems started to arise, availability became another important concern to be taken into consideration. Werner Vogels outlines some principles, abstractions and consistency/availability trade-offs related to large scale data replication with focus on eventual consistency.
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Presentation: Managing a high performance rails app without tearing your hair out
Rails has gained popularity for its clean implementation of MVC and slick APIs. But what happens when your Rails app grows up, gets popular but can't keep up with requests? This presentation by James Cox will get you started with optimizing web applications by giving practical tips and pointing out common bottlenecks.