John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own.
The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the ‘read lots, write once’ class (most of the web exists within this paradigm.) Regardless of the database [...]
After building a new gigabit network here, we wanted to know exactly what our performance was like.
I turned to CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, which has long been a provider of excellent network performance tools. Their research focuses on developing tools to measure the Internet in many amazing ways, such as this map [...]
If your site uses common AJAX libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us, or dojo, the first thing that you’ll notice is that these libraries are quite large and impact page load time.
For a browser with a completely empty cache, the browser will load the requested library (and block all other requests during the [...]
I’ve been experimenting with a few things this week while trying to wade my way through Twitter’s infrastructure. One tool that’s been of extreme help in digging through source code and an extensive set of configuration files has been ack!
It’s the only piece of software I know of that has ‘–thpppt’ as an option (Install [...]
