/Performance

Python 3.11 Is Up To 10 - 60% Faster Than Python 3.10

tl;dr: "CPython 3.11 is on average 25% faster than CPython 3.10 when measured with the pyperformance benchmark suite, and compiled with GCC on Ubuntu Linux. Depending on your workload, the speedup could be up to 10-60% faster. This project focuses on two major areas in Python: faster startup and faster runtime."

featured in #332

The Two Generals Problem

- Seth Archer Brown tl;dr: "Imagine there’s a city in a valley. On either side of the valley, there’s an army commanded by a general. On one side stands General Alice and her army. On the other, General Bob and his army. Alice and Bob want to capture the city, but neither has an army large enough to do so alone. Alice and Bob must attack at the same time, but Alice and Bob can only communicate by sending messengers through the valley, who have a chance of being captured by the city’s army. How do Alice and Bob coordinate their attack?"

featured in #319

How To Speed Up ClickHouse Queries Using Materialized Columns

- Karl-Aksel Puulmann tl;dr: ClickHouse supports speeding up queries using materialized columns to create new columns on the fly from existing data. In this post, I’ll walk through a query optimization example that's well-suited to this rarely-used feature.

featured in #307

The Fastest GIF Does Not Exist

- Ben Phelps tl;dr: "If you're here because you want to fix your GIF and want the quick answer, the solution is: set your frame delay to 20ms instead of 10ms. If you want to learn a bit more about GIFs, exactly why this edge case happens, and some thoughts on how to improve things, keep reading!"

featured in #293

Fixing Performance Regressions Before They Happen

tl;dr: “This post describes how the Netflix TVUI team implemented a robust strategy to quickly and easily detect performance anomalies before they are released — and often before they are even committed to the codebase.”

featured in #288

Memory Leaks: The Forgotten Side Of Web Performance

- Nolan Lawson tl;dr: "If you speed up your website by 2 seconds, everyone agrees that that’s a good thing with a visible user impact. If you reduce your website’s memory leak by 2 MB, can we still agree it was worth it? Maybe not." Nolan discusses the unique characteristics of memory leaks: (1) Low-impact until critical. (2) Hard to diagnose. (3) Trivial to fix once diagnosed.

featured in #280

The Speed Of Time

- Brendan Gregg tl;dr: Brendan describes a weird performance issue he debugged: "A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. What on Earth is Ubuntu doing that results in 30% higher CPU time!?" 

featured in #255

5000x Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization

tl;dr: The author read a paper about implementing collaborative editing tools and one of the algorithms mentioned took over 3 seconds to process, which is slow. It was his own algorithm, and in this post he makes amends and shows hot to speed the tools up.

featured in #242

How Do Chrome Extensions Impact Browser Performance?

- Matt Zeunert tl;dr: "This report investigates how 1000 of the most popular Chrome extensions impact browser performance and end-user experience." Key findings: (1) Extensions like Honey, Evernote Web Clipper, and Avira Browser Safety can have a significant negative impact on website speed." (2) On ad-heavy websites, ad blockers and privacy tools can greatly improve performance.

featured in #242

How We Improved The Performance Of Our Rust App

- Aram Drevekenin tl;dr: There are two performance issues Aram solves in the multiplexer app - data overflow in the MPSC channel and performance of rendering and data parsing.

featured in #239