Benchmarks Last Week
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Brief items on notable IT-related developments, both current and historical.
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Key happenings this week in the retail and restaurant sectors.
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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.   The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.  He talks about a few different aspects:  PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc) RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving) HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)
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A website goes the extra mile to make sure voters aren & rsquo;t confused this Tuesday.  Also: West Virginia organizes the first public supercomputer & hellip;.  FDA keeps its eye on a new pain relief drug & hellip;. and more.
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A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:  At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read.  I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof.  The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further.  The ruby-prof articles are:  Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof:  getting specific. Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside.  They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20).  There have been a lot of interesting entries so far.  It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up. We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post.  RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly.  If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering. O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook.  It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust.  Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf. APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way.  They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them.  They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post. No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises.  I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog.  If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'. The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line.  James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book.  It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels. Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming.  Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer.  Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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Checking in on two underdog picks, as well as some companies left on the bench.
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In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:   Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.   After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.    Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.
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Seven events that shaped your portfolio this week.
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roundup Plus: The company also expects to meet or exceed analyst estimates...Salesforce.com reports subscriber surge...RealNetworks signs up Red Flag Linux.
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A recap of some of the hottest stocks on the market.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP.net: PHP 4 end of life announcementZend Developer Zone: Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHPStoyan Stefanov's Blog: phpBB front-end optimization - 1 hour workshopSitePoint PHP Blog: Win Cash for the best Facebook App!Elizabeth Naramore's Blog: July Edition of IPM PublishedJob Posting: ManicMelon.com Seeks Mid-Senior LAMP Web Application Developer (Overland Park, KS)Paul Jones' Blog: Solar Views and LayoutsCodeIgniter Blog: Version 1.5.4 ReleasedPHP-GTK Community Site: MkDevDVD (DVD Manager for Linux)Job Posting: Next Internet Seeks Senior Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others are jostling for bragging rights. Also: A speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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AMD Opteron servers prove more power-efficient than Xeon-powered servers in tests.
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Plus: IBM, Yahoo post high...AMD posts loss...Sony TV unit struggling...Nokia on upswing...Apple beats expectations.
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roundup Plus: WebSideStory cuts IPO to 4.4 million shares...BMC looks to simplify network operations...Data center firms settle cookie suit.
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Plus: Novell reverses year-earlier profit...Lenovo posts 2006-07 net surge...HP sales up on PC strength.