InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Azul Systems To Open Source Significant Technology in Managed Runtime Initiative
Having just announced a record breaking quarter, Azul Systems are open sourcing a considerable part of their intellectual property under GPLV2, as part of a major new initiative to try and improve the performance of managed code on commodity platforms.
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7 Lessons Learned at Reddit
Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, shares the main lessons he learned scaling Reddit from a small web application to a large social website.
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Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended
Dana Groff has announced the end of Microsoft’s experiment with software transactional memory for the .NET Framework. Known as STM.NET, this research project was announced in 2008 as an alternative to explicit locks when dealing with concurrency issues.
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ScaleUp Addresses Many of IIS’ File Uploading Limitations
LeanServer has created for IIS 7.0 an extension called ScaleUp, solving some of the problems related to file uploading and plaguing Microsoft’s web platform. According to its creators, ScaleUp increases upload speed, supports unlimited upload file sizes, scales up to thousands of uploads per server, and includes progress reporting, streaming and filtering.
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What Color is your Backlog?
At the recent SDC conference in Wellington Prof Philippe Kruchten delivered a talk titled “What Color is Your Backlog”. The thrust of his talk is about bringing a focus on architecturally significant aspects of software into Agile projects, along with delivering the functional components of the system. He uses a color metaphor to illustrate the importance of addressing four types of work.
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Patterns and Samples for .NET Parallel Extensions
Even though Microsoft has been working on .NET’s Parallel Extensions since 2007, there are still many features that they didn’t have time to fully implement for .NET 4.0. Some features were “too application-specific to be included in the core of the Framework” while others simply needed for testing and user feedback. So instead they are being released as a set of patterns and samples.
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Keeping Garbage Collection Pauses Short with Growing Heap Sizes: Q&A With Dr. Cliff Click
The strong correlation between heap size and garbage collection pause time is becoming one of the major limitations to Java application scalability, and a great deal of R&D effort is going into trying to remedy the situation. InfoQ talked to Dr. Cliff Click, former architect and lead developer of the HotSpot Server Compiler and now chief JVM Architect at Azul Systems, about Azul's solution.
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Improving the Performance of Web Applications with Google’s Native Client
In order to increase the performance of CPU-intensive web applications, Google is developing Native Client, a browser technology used to run native code. Unlike Netscape’s NPAPI or Microsoft’s ActiveX plug-in technologies, Native Client runs in a double sandbox prohibiting access to the underlying operating system.
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Visual Studio Dropping Support for Itanium
SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will be the last major versions to support Intel’s Itanium processor. While extended support will be offered for 8 years, new investments in the Itanium should be weighed carefully against AMD’s far more popular x64 architecture.
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JRuby Roundup: JRuby-Prof Allows Fast Profiling, JRuby::Synchronized for Automatic Synchronization
JRuby-Prof is a new, low overhead profiler for JRuby which, unlike plain Java profilers, will generate clear, Ruby-specific reports. A new feature in JRuby is JRuby::Synchronized, a module that, when extended, will make all methods of a class synchronized.
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Digg and Reddit Have Joined the NoSQL Camp
Both Digg and Reddit have announced their move to Cassandra this month because MySQL does not scale well enough for them. Some consider that MySQL + memcache is no longer the de facto scalability solution.
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GigaSpaces XAP 7.1 EA: Elastic Middleware, Data Querying and Spring 3.x
GigaSpaces XAP is a distributed application server with an in-memory data grid. The XAP 7.1 release includes a number of themes: an Elastic Middleware Service, enhanced virtualization compatibility, data querying, an updated web-based management application, embedded Spring 3.0, and performance improvements. InfoQ explored this EA release to learn more.
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Scaling Out the Most Popular Social Game, FarmVille
With 83.75 million monthly active users, FarmVille is the most popular game on Facebook and one of the most popular web-based games on the Internet. To scale out, the application is deployed inside the cloud, uses cache extensively, has the ability to turn off some of the functionality during peak times and makes use of performance monitoring and managing.
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Dynamic Language Roundup: Python's GIL Gets Overhauled but not Removed, Squeak Comes to Android
The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.
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ConcurrentDictionary, .NET 4.0’s New Thread-Safe Hashtable
The ConcurrentDictionary is a cornerstone in .NET 4.0’s greatly increased emphasis on parallel and concurrent programming. But while vastly superior to what we have seen in the past, it isn’t a panacea and developers need to study its semantics carefully.