Free Software Linux

The Hackosis blog notes a contentious conversation thread between Linux creator Linus Torvalds and a programmer who finds that disabling the atime option, which writes a last-accessed time to every single file that's accessed by a Linux system, nets some significant performance improvements.

I updated the Opening Remix Networks with some new slides, dropped some other wasteful ones, and I think the presentation is much better. Of course, there are times where I play video, and I’ve substituted slides for those clips and associated audio files.

With PHP's widespread adoption, it's almost too easy to find a script or snippet to do exactly what you need. Unfortunately, there's no filter to determine what is good practice when writing a PHP script. We need PHP masters to show us the best principles to follow for high-grade PHP programming.

A recent discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list noted that threaded 64-bit applications suffer a drastic slowdown in pthread_create performance when stack utilization goes above 4GB. Ingo Molnar offered an explanation of the problem, "unfortunately MAP_32BIT use in 64-bit apps for stacks was apparently created without foresight about what would happen in the MM when thread stacks exhaust 4GB. The problem is that MAP_32BIT is used both as a performance hack for 64-bit apps and as an ABI compat mechanism for 32-bit apps.

If your Vista PC isn't as speedy as you'd like, straight from the horse's mouth comes a 14-page PDF document on Vista Performance and Tuning. Microsoft's suggestions include customizing Vista's power...

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes. read more

In the last post I commented that I had a test-bed application, based on Apache, PHP and Firebird, and once the problem with the images was solved I could finally start doing the actual performance testing/tuning that I originally wanted to do.  The only major changes from the last post is that I’ve now upgraded the database engine to the [...]

Windows only: Freeware application HeavyLoad tests your computer's performance under pressure by maxing out your CPU usage and eating up memory. If neither your computer nor HeavyLoad crash, the idea...

I usually get this question about the varying Broadband speed from many of my readers. The usual question goes like this I am on a 512 kbps unlimited plan but still my download speed is not more than 64kbps . Do you have any clues. Is my ISP cheating? Where can i measure my actual broadband speed? So here you go, The first thing to remember is that most of the ISP’s sell the speed as upto speed and not a guaranteed speed. Also, upto speed usually is not the speed we get most of the times. In such scenarios if you really wish to test your current internet speed, Speedtest.net is for you.

Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it, "represents an additional significant improvement in performance, [also including] bug fixes and most of the final media changes." A significant improvement in write performance was obtained by making the filesystem block size automatically increase from 16K to 64K when a file grows to larger than 1 MB. One remaining media change is required to optimize mtime and atime storage, at which point HAMMER will go into testing and bug fixing mode. Matt noted, "HAMMER's performance is extremely good now, and its system cpu overhead has dropped to roughly the same that we get from UFS", adding, "HAMMER is now able to sustain full disk bandwidth for bulk reads and writes.

You've already seen how Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer compare in terms of speed, page load, and memory consumption with Kevin's unscientific (but thorough) performance tests. Now the...

Firefox 3 javascript performance and memory usage study on linux

Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you'll see claims that every one of them is "faster" than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher...

"After another round of performance tuning HAMMER all my benchmarks show HAMMER within 10% of UFS's performance, and it beats the shit out of UFS in certain tests such as file creation and random write performance," noted DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon, providing an update on his new clustering filesystem. He continued, "read performance is good but drops more then UFS under heavy write loads (but write performance is much better at the same time)." He then referred to the blogbench benchmark noting, "now when UFS gets past blog #300 and blows out the system caches, UFS's write performance goes completely to hell but it is able to maintain good read performance." Matthew then compared this to HAMMER:

Comparing the performance of several operations in FB2.1, OraXE and SQLServerXE using the vendor specific .NET data access drivers, I discovered Firebird was about 3 times faster than the others which were both nearly the same speed.