Ryan Tomayko

A Hidden Cost of Javascript —

Interesting set of results from a series of JavaScript parse and load benchmarks on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera presented with pretty graphs and tables. I’m convinced browser-side JavaScript profiling and optimization—including this kind of parse+load and GC profiling—is going to occupy more and more of my time in the future.

Optimizing Optimizing HTML —

Oh neat. You can drop the type='text/javascript' from your <script> tags, type='text/css' from your <style> (and/or <link rel='stylesheet'>) tags and the browsers won’t care. Also, in 2010, <b> and <i> are cooler than <strong> and <em>, and trailing slashes on self closing tags are lame.

Personally, I like these little tricks for making HTML more human readable but I can’t believe people are actually doing stuff like this in an attempt to compress HTML to gain network/browser efficiencies. I dare someone to actually benchmark those optimizations. Cutting your sucky EULA page in half and trimming away all that shit in your header/sidebar would be much more productive (but still barely worthwhile).

Let's make the web faster —

Big giant list of articles, essays, tutorials, and tech talks on making the web faster. This is part of a larger Google Code project that asks, “what would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine?”

minigems —

An interesting RubyGems mod by Fabien Franzen that seems to fix the memory hit a process takes on require 'rubygems'. Unfortunately, you have to code for it in your app and apply it to installed ruby commands explicitly. Fabien has submitted a ticket and patch to the RubyGems project, however. You should +1 it (after reviewing the code, of course).

The C10K problem —

Dan Kegel: “You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1200 or so. Let’s see – at 20000 clients, that’s 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn’t take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients. (That works out to $0.08 per client, by the way. Those $100/client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck. ”

Looks like this is from 2003 but is still pretty accurate as far as I can tell.