Stuart Herbert's Blog: More about Performance Tuning
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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A fast PC doesnât mean just a fast processor. Hard-drive speeds, memory and other considerations all affect a systemâs performance.
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Better performance and operational refinements top the list of improvements over Windows Vista Beta 2.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Chip maker says it will use methods other than clock speed to improve processor performance.
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others jostle for bragging rights. Also: Speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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The design twist will let the company increase the performance of its processors.
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On DevShed today, there's the second part in a two part series (another excerpt from the "Zend PHP Certification" from Zend) talking about getting the most out of your application and platform through some simple debugging/optimizing tools.   They start off with a look at debuggers - what they're for and a brief mention (high level) of how to use them. Next up is some simple suggestions for optimizing the performance of your application:  Hardware issues Web server issues Avoid overkill Zip it up Database optimizations  They also include a simple recommendation that all developers, looking for performance boosts or not should follow - "keep your code simple".
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.
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Padraic Brady has posted a manifesto of sorts about the work that he's been doing on his PHPSpec library and trying to work it into the approval process for the Zend Framework.   I'll be attempting to pound the Zend Framework into submission so I can apply Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using PHPSpec when I write a Controller. Why? Because I feel like it, and it gives me an excuse to promote one possible incarnation of PHPMock and the PHPSpec Zend Framework extension. See? Perfectly reasonable selfishness!   He hopes to move it past the typical test-driven development process that PHPUnit offers and "kick your ass into high-TDD gear" without having to have worked much with it before then (the key is simplicity).   He includes some code examples (how it should flow) and describes some of the challenges that he's coming across so far, specifically with the way that the Zend Framework works with the Controllers and what he wants to accomplish.
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By Dumoulin, Fred  An effective monitoring strategy should zero in on Web performance problems from three directions: the user application experience, device availability and site availability.
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Mozilla's latest pre-release version of its browser remains buggy, but performance enhancements give us reason to get excited. In Monkey Bites.
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Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
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On the Mark: The blame game within IT can slow the resolution of problems reported by end users. But there are tools that can put a stop to all the finger-pointing, Mark Hall writes.
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A few simple changes--and some useful keyboard shortcuts--let you work faster and smarter in your browser.
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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Judging by the number of hits tallied for Troubleshooting Linux Audio Part 1 it seems the topic is of interest to many readers. Alas, I must apologize to everyone waiting for the next parts of the series. Various events have kept me from completing it in short order, but you may rest assured that it will return in my next installment. Meanwhile, this week we'll look at two excellent applications that are coming into greater use here at Studio Dave, the LiVES video editor for Linux, and Reaper (yes, again), a native Windows audio/MIDI sequencer running under Wine.