InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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High Performance Ruby MVC: Merb
By some accounts, Ruby on Rails request-processing has slowed 10-20% with each recent release, so Ezra Zygmuntowicz built his own Ruby-based MVC framework using some of the best parts of Rails. Recently, at the Ruby Hoedown event, Ezra demonstrated how Merb keeps the agility of ActiveRecord while focusing on high-load performance and concurrency.
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Interview: Dan Pritchett on Architecture at eBay
Dan Pritchett gives us an inside look into the decisions behind one of the largest scale architectures in the world: eBay. In explaining how the scale of eBay turns simple requirements a complex engineering problem, he walks us through the technical and organizational challenges of managing eBay's architecture.
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Ruby 1.9 adds Fibers for lightweight concurrency
Fibers were recently in the Ruby 1.9 branch. The Coroutine-like concept has many uses, such as implementing lightweight concurrency and others. We look at the concept and influences of Fibers in Ruby 1.9, as well as code samples.
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Ruby Hoedown Presentations available online
Videos of the sessions from the Ruby Hoedown conference are now available online. Topics such as Merb, Ruby tuning, VoIP with Ruby are covered, as well as Smalltalk and Ruby history and much more.
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Erlang's Mnesia - a distributed DBMS for highly scalable apps
Not every application has the scalability requirements of Google, Flickr or Amazon, however the ideas behind the Mnesia DBMS are compelling: a fast, in-process DBMS that takes advantage of concurrency, with the ability to replicate tables across distributed nodes for high scalability and fault tolerance.
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New patterns and middleware architecture needed for true linear scalability?
Nati Shalom says existing tier-based middleware cannot for true linear scalablility. Instead he proposes a new middleware stack based on self-sufficient processing units that supports a partitioned/scale-out model. Pat Helland at Microsoft some years ago proposed some new transactional patterns and formalizations to be used in what he calls almost-infinite scalable systems.
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WSO2 publishes new round of performance metrics for their ESB
WSO2 has recently published a second set of performance metrics for their ESB. It shows that WSO2 ESB outperforms Mule and Apache ServiceMix.
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Microsoft Research's Accelerator: A Data-Parallel Library for .NET that Targets GPUs
Microsoft Research's Accelerator Project exposes a .NET library for performing parallel data processing using a computer's GPU.
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Rubinius Internals: Threading, ObjectSpace, Debugging
We continue the interview with Rubinius creator Evan Phoenix and talk about internals of how the VM uses bytecode manipulation for fast debugging, problems of implementing ObjectSpace and Threading.
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Azul Systems: Next generation Java-based 768 core server released
Azul Systems has announced the release of their third-generation Java-based computing appliance with 768 processing cores. Azul also recently settled a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems. InfoQ caught up with Azul's Gaetan Castelein to discuss these recent events.
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Performance Problems with Lambdas
The LINQ Cookbook reveals some performance issues when using lambdas instead of traditional functions.
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Google Scalability Session Report
Dare Obasanjo shared his notes on a session given by Jeff Dean at the Google Conference on Scalability, "MapReduce, BigTable, and Other Distributed System Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets".
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Configured Rails software stacks become available
Setting up and configuring servers is tedious work, particularly if a lot of libraries are involved. The Rails community has started looking into solutions for solving this, and the first are now available.
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Aaron Erickson on LINQ and i4o
In an interview with InfoQ, Aaron Erickson introduces his new LINQ extension Indexes for Objects (i4o). Indexes for Objects allows for fast lookup against in-memory collections while retaining the LINQ syntax and semantics. He also discusses how expression trees interact with LINQ and how they can be leveraged in other scenarios.
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WebLOAD: Commercial Load Testing Tool Recently Open Sourced
WebLOAD is a load testing tool from Radview that tests both for performance and also correctness. Test scripts are written in Javascript and the tool supports multiple protocols for testing all tiers of an app such as web (HTTP with Ajax support), SOAP/XML, and other protocols. This past April Radview released an open source community edition of WebLOAD under GPL, available at webload.org.