Firefox 4 will be delivering GPU-accelerated rendering for graphical elements via the Direct2D APIs on Windows, among many other new features like a new tab layout, new look and feel for Windows and new privacy features.
Currently at Beta 4, Firefox 4 has had GPU-acceleration in the code-base, but it has always been disabled by default [...]
Tag Archives: performance
Firefox 4 Adding GPU-Accelerated Graphics Rendering
Native MMS Enabled on iPhone 2G Kills Battery Life
We wrote a “How to Enable MMS on your 2G iPhone w/ 3.1.2 Firmware” guide a few weeks ago when reader SEA-LegS popped into the comments that he had been running the Native MMS app after following the guide and his battery life had been cut in half or a third of what it used [...]
Java IO Faster Than NIO – Old is New Again!
Alex Blewitt tweeted an article by Paul Tyma titled: Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O: The old way to write Java servers is new again. Paul is the Founder/CEO of ManyBrain, the creator of Mailinator.
Paul’s 65-slide presentation is a fast read for anyone interested in Java I/O, especially in a client/server setup. What makes the [...]
FFmpeg’s VP8 Decoder 62% Faster Than Google’s
The FFmpeg team has completed the initial implementation of their new VP8 decoder and early benchmarks are showing it up to 62% faster than Google’s own VP8 decoder: libvpx.
A few weeks ago we covered the announcement that the FFmpeg video-codec team had decided to build their own VP8 decoder and did an initial implementation in [...]
Odd ReadyNAS NV+ Performance Boost Tip: Disable Jumbo Frames
A real quick tip for folks experiencing abysmal Read/Write performance on their ReadyNAS devices: Try disabling Jumbo Frames.
Jumb Frames only benefit you if your client supports it, any switches or routers you are connecting through support it, and the ReadyNAS you are ultimately communicating with support it.
If any links in that chain do not support [...]
Sunsceen Performance and Safety Testing Guide
The results were recently published of an independent study done by the EWG. They took over 500 store bought sunscreens and put them to the test. And the results were pretty shocking.
The worst offender being “Banana Boat Beach Baby Max” with an advertised SPF rating of 100, but after performing an industry standard test, it [...]
Chinese Version of Cirque du Soleil
This is an unbelievably talented troop of Chinese gymnasts performing a routine that I can only imagine Jesus might attempt:
Yes, yes you just saw a 4-man pole formed by people front-flipping inside of the pole to make it taller… I’m going to start learning Chinese so when they take us over, I can be assimilated easier.
Seagate’s Hybrid Momentus XT Hard Drive Performance Shortcomings
A few weeks ago Seagate announced the world’s first (successful) hybrid spindle-hard-drive/SSD-hard-drive. It was a combination of a 500GB spindle drive like their standard Barracuda series matched with 4GB of flash memory inside of the hard drive to give some of the benefits that SSD hard drives enjoy without incurring the cost of all that flash memory; [...]
Funny Opera Browser Speed Test
I suppose Google put together a Rube-Goldberg “speed test” of the Chrome browser and Opera decided to 1-up them with what I found a hugely entertaining and funny “Opera Browser vs a Potato” speed test video.
A lot of what I found to be gold about this video was that it’s more like an SNL skit [...]
Increase WordPress Performance on Apache with Worker MPM, PHP and mod_fcgid
This is a continuation of two previous posts about Apache performance running PHP-apps like WordPress. One was on running PHP via CGI and the other was on running Apache with the thread-based “Worker” MPM instead of the default “Prefork” MPM.
As mentioned in the other posts (incase you don’t want to read them… I don’t blame [...]
Optimizing WordPress Page-Load Pauses with PHP-CGI
For the last 6-months I’ve been trying to deal with mysterious “page load pause” issues with WordPress on my Apache/prefork/mod_php setup. Server load was low, hardware was a 4GB 2-core machine, spent 4 months of that time tweaking MaxClients and other Apache prefork settings until I finally gave up.
The behavior I was seeing is hitting the [...]
NVIDIA GeForce 480 – 6 months to Play Catch-up
Wow, what a disappointment. After all the NVIDIA-spewed hype about beating down ATI when their DX 11 cards were finally out, the reviews are finally in on the brand new NVIDIA 480 and 470 cards and I’ll save you the trouble of reading every single review out there like I just did:
NVIDIA’s GeForce 480 performs [...]
Intel X25-M 160GB SSD vs Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 SCSI Benchmarks
What happens when you are addicted to speed and have a Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 (SCSI) drive setup in your desktop and a brand new Intel X25-M in your laptop? You benchmark them, that’s what!
AMD Releasing 12-core "Magny Cours" CPUs in March
You need to go get your hat… and then hold onto it. What you see above is AMD’s upcoming “Magny-Cours” 12-core CPU slated for release this March — as in 2 weeks away.
These upcoming chips will be part of the Opteron 6000 family and have 3 offerings starting at speeds:
1.90 Ghz
2.10 Ghz
2.20 Ghz
Xbit Labs also [...]
Myriad Announced Dalvik Turbo – Android Gets 3x Speedup
Engadget covered a story about the company Myriad Group AG that was showing off their “Dalvik Turbo VM” product at the Mobile World Congress. At their booth they had an OpenGL demo running on two Google Ion (HTC Magic) phones, about 1/2 the horsepower of a Nexus One.
In this particular “spinning 3D box” demo, the [...]
BlackBerry Demos WebKit-based Browser
While HTC wasn’t busy announcing new clones of the Nexus One, BlackBerry made 20 million BlackBerry owners cry with joy today at the Mobile World Congress conference by showing off their upcoming HTML5-compliant, WebKit-based browser for BlackBerry devices. BlackBerry’s upcoming browser is the result of their 2009 purchase of Torch Mobile, the creators of the [...]
Disable 'Indexing' in Windows 7 to Speed Up Deletion of Many Files
I’ve been on Windows 7 since the RC was released — that coupled with the fact that I’m a blogger makes me an expert, you should trust me and take my word on everything unconditionally — and while I’ve been overall pretty happy (20 tips and tricks, 8GB performance) there have been a few niggles [...]
Nexus One 'Poor T-Mobile 3G Signal' Issue Discovered
Update #1: Google has responded to the long thread with an announcement that an over-the-air (OTA) update to help make the 3G connections more stable in 3G-covered areas will be coming out, but if you are outside of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage area (which is small) there will be no change in experience for you. Release [...]
NVIDIA GeForce 300 – Leaked Videos
Some leaked videos of the upcoming DX 11 compatible part from NVIDIA, the GeForce 300, hit the web today and look decently impressive. For example, instead of 50 FPS in what looks like Crysis, they are getting 70 FPS. Not life-changing as a lot of us had hoped, but I don’t actually remember 2x performance [...]
When Server Load Goes to the Moon – Slicehost 'resize' Comes to the Rescue
One of the member sites of The Buzz Media ran a story this morning that caused the load on the host server to go pas ‘11′… waaaay way past ‘11′ – to 257.89 to be exact according to ‘top’ (above).
This host server was not in a load-balanced configuration when the rush happened, we weren’t able [...]
Amazon EC2 Performance Drops – Too Many Users
Alan Williamson recently wrote about his companies long-term (multi-year) experience with Amazon EC2 and sums up the degrading experience as:
Again, great services just as long as you don’t use them too much!
Alan clarified that they started deploying on EC2 about 2 years ago, initially using the “SMALL” instances for most DB instances and Web front-ends [...]
CryEngine 3 PS3 Tech Demo
This is more of an aside, but Crytek’s Cevat Yerli shows off a demonstration of the upcoming (September ‘09 release) CryEngine 3 and I’m floored.
The enhancements that Crytek have gotten into CryEngine 3 are nothing short of amazing, specifically on the PS3. Cevat explains that over the years they have had two R&D engine teams [...]
Windows 7 – 4GB vs 8GB Performance
When I originally installed Windows 7 64-bit, I had 4GB in my machine. While the performance improvements I saw were noticable and appreciated, it was clear that Windows 7 was more than happy to consume all the RAM I could possibly throw at it:
At the urging of Grant Gochanuer (happy owner of 12GB of RAM), [...]
Thoughts on Windows 7 After 3 Days
Introduction
It is no mystery that I’ve been part of the parade yelling “Vista Sucks!” since it’s inception – I’ve even taken the time to review Vista’s shortcomings for everyone willing to read it by only taking a look at changes in one program as an example of the half-assed decisions made throughout the entire OS.
The [...]
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