Innovation in artistic process and expression is at the heart of the many initiatives being explored in the art, design and performance laboratories in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

Lift is an expressive and elegant framework for writing web applications. Lift stresses the importance of security, maintainability, scalability and performance, while allowing for high levels of developer productivity. Lift open source software licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.

Although we are not comparing apples to apples, Gentoo did out-perform Ubuntu in almost every test, and sometimes by a fair margin. It does appear that optimizing for a specific CPU can yield a decent performance increase.

Of course, Gentoo offers benefits in other areas with their USE flags and being able to build a highly customized system. The question is whether the amount of time it takes is worth the benefit, and that’s a personal choice.

Developing Flowdock, a real-time environment allowing teams to work together seamlessly, we needed a database able to scale horizontally for huge amount of write operations. Cassandra’s data model and performance characteristics made it a perfect fit for our needs.

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API’s are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don’t just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

What, a performance regression? But we threw more memory at it!! How can that be!

Memcached is not a cure all.

A quick survey shows that seven of the Alexa U.S. top ten web sites have a SCRIPT tag above their stylesheets or STYLE blocks: AOL, Facebook, Google, Bing, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!. These web sites don’t currently use @font-face, but if they did, they would experience the IE blocked rendering problem. This raises the concern that other web sites that are early adopters of @font-face have a SCRIPT tag above @font-face and their IE users run the risk of experiencing blocked rendering.

What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine? We invite you to join us in exploring and innovating across the entire spectrum of performance - from Internet protocols to the browser to website development. Together, let's make the web faster!

tracking Aptimize for about a year since they contacted me about their Website Accelerator. I was psyched to have them present at and sponsor Velocity. Website Accelerator changes web pages in real time and injects many of the performance best practices from my books, plus some others that aren’t in my books. It’s a server-side module that runs on Microsoft Sharepoint, ASP.NET, and Linux/Apache.

Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what's going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users' internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised.