The Buzz Media » performance

How to Unlock an AMD Radeon HD 6950 to an 6970 Easily

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 17:23:53 +0000

I purchased an XFX Radeon HD 6950 (2GB) video card a few months ago in preparation for all the triple-a titles that have come out in the last year; while I miss the PhysX support for the occasional game that supports it, I’ve been mostly happy. Shortly after the dual-launch of both the 6950 and [...]

imgscalr 4.0 released – Optimal Java Image Scaling

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:13:30 +0000

imgscalr is an optimized, fault-tolerant and simple Java library used to resize, rotate, filter, crop or pad images. imgscalr implements the most optimal code-paths for these tasks as recommended by the Java2D team and internally works around a number of hidden JDK and even JVM bugs pertaining to image operations via the Java2D pipeline. imgscalr [...]

Origin PC Launches AMD FX 8-Core 5Ghz Unlocked Desktop Monster

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:47:06 +0000

It looks like Origin PC may have beaten everyone to the punch with this Ghz-unlocked, 8-core AMD FX monster of a machine. I didn’t see any solid ship dates, but AMD’s release date for the Bulldozer architecture has been Q4 for a while now, so I imagine at some point between now and December we’ll [...]

Simple Java XML Parser (SJXP) 2.1 Released

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:20:58 +0000

Hot on the heals of the 2.0 release, SJXP 2.1 was released with the following changes: Fixed bug where isStartTag was always true for TAG type rules https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/simple-java-xml-parser/issues/closed#issue/6 Removed use of enhanced for-loop in code base because it caused a large number of AbstractList$Itr classes to be created for no great reason. https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/simple-java-xml-parser/issues/closed#issue/5 As always, head [...]

Simple Java XML Parser (SJXP) 2.0 Released

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:21:41 +0000

I am proud to scream from the top of my desk, directly at my closet, that Simple Java XML Parser (SJXP) 2.0 has just been released. The 2.0 release brings a huge performance boost over the 1.x series that decreases memory and CPU usage by an order of magnitude. Additionally, user object pass-through support was [...]

W3 Total Cache: Import Media Library to CDN is Incomplete or Fails

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 02:13:03 +0000

We are current in the midst of moving 5 years worth of media to a CDN to help increase page-load speed and I have hit some bumps along the way that I want to write about incase anyone else is running into the same problems. I have used the WordPress cache plugin WP-SuperCache for something [...]

QN: imgscalr Java Image-Scaling Library 1.2 Released

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:15:09 +0000

Version 1.2 of the imgscalr Java image-scaling library has been released. This release makes the library easier to use, accessible from the new The Buzz Media Maven repository and improved the logic used to determine the proportionally-scaled width and height for images depending on their orientation (LANDSCAPE or PORTRAIT). For download links, Javadoc, source code [...]

QN: OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs – 500 MB/sec Speed

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:33:51 +0000

OCZ has just announced the release of their Vertex 3 lineup of SSDs for consumers and enterprise customers. The specs you see above are from the Vertex 3 Pro which is their consumer SSD based on the SandForce SF-2000 series controller. Many have been waiting for SF-2000 series based drives since the controller was announced [...]

imgscalr – Java Image Scaling Library Released

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 19:36:20 +0000

If you have ever wanted to quickly rescale an image in Java you have probably noticed the following confusing things: There seem to be something like 9 different ways to do this: Image.getScaledInstance(), Graphics.drawImage(), Graphics2D.drawImage(…), BufferImageOps, AffineTransforms and don’t forget Java Advanced Imaging API. Which one are you suppose to use? Which one performs the [...]

How nginx and PHP-FPM Saved My WordPress Site (and Sanity)

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:10:47 +0000

DISCLAIMER: I am not an Apache expert. I accept that it is likely possible for someone smarter than me to tweak Apache to perform comparable to nginx, but I spent 2 solid years trying to get it to perform and was never able to. I have been writing this site for almost 5 years now. [...]

Nintendo 3DS Has Some Decent 3D Chops

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:15:17 +0000

Nintendo recently leaked some 3DS screenshots to Japanese media in preparation for the upcoming launch of the 3DS in Japan (in the US we will have to wait until likely March timeframe). While you cannot experience any of the awesomeness that is the 3D effect on the 3DS, you can get an idea of the [...]

AreWeFastYet – Popular JavaScript Engine Performance Compared

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:20:19 +0000

I recently became aware of the site AreWeFastYet via a tweet from jQuery’s creator, John Resig. The site is a Mozilla-maintained property that benchmarks the most popular JavaScript engines against each other using both the WebKit SunSpider and Google’s v8bench JavaScript benchmarks every day. The JavaScript engines benchmarked are: Mozilla’s JavaScript Engine (black – labelled “moz [...]

Justin Bieber Uses 3% of Twitter’s Infrastructure

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:26:47 +0000

I’m older than 13 and do not understand the geological phenomenon that is Justin Bieber. He is a nice enough looking young man, but from watching one of his videos to better understand the fad, all I can tell is that he is a manufactured property of Usher and Scooter Braun’s intended to sell subliminal [...]

NETGEAR Powerline AV 200 (XAVB2001) Ethernet Adapter Kit Review

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:22:27 +0000

NETGEAR’s Powerline AV 200 (XAV2001) adapters turns in strong numbers for a home network when compared to an existing Wireless-N solution; particularly over long, multi-room spans, even with noisy appliances in the way. In this review we measure the performance of the NETGEAR Powerline AV 200 adapters in increasing distances from our base station and compare [...]

Firefox 4 Adding GPU-Accelerated Graphics Rendering

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:30:40 +0000

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 [...]

Native MMS Enabled on iPhone 2G Kills Battery Life

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:16:35 +0000

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!

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:41:31 +0000

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 [...]

FFmpeg’s VP8 Decoder 62% Faster Than Google’s

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:05:02 +0000

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 [...]

Odd ReadyNAS NV+ Performance Boost Tip: Disable Jumbo Frames

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:00:49 +0000

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 [...]

Sunsceen Performance and Safety Testing Guide

Chris Hunkele — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:39:54 +0000

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, [...]

Chinese Version of Cirque du Soleil

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:43:00 +0000

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

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:47:22 +0000

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

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:14:53 +0000

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 [...]

Increase WordPress Performance on Apache with Worker MPM, PHP and mod_fcgid

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:41:41 +0000

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 [...]