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 [...]
Tag Archives | performance
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming Performance for Viewers
What’s Going on with Netflix Streaming Performance? I noticed about 3 weeks ago my streaming video performance from Netflix has become unbearably slow. I’m on a 7 mbps Qwest DSL line in Tucson, AZ and my previous experience with Netflix “Watch Instantly” service had generally been excellent, almost never showing the buffering screen for a [...]
24 Samsung SSD RAID Array – 2 GB/sec
In a brilliant marketing move, Samsung sent 24 SSDs to a group to play with/benchmark and this is what they ended up doing with it: Building a dual, quad-core monster box With a 24-disk SSD RAID array The machine at it’s peak performance gets around 2 GB/sec (not gigaBIT, but gigaBYTE). To show off what [...]
Lenovo Uses Samsung SSDs in ThinkPads – Safe From Performance Problems
I currently have a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 — I got it a little over 2 years ago and have loved it. Lenovo support, while crumby at first, really came through the other time I needed them — calling to schedule a repair on a Saturday morning in order to get my repaired laptop back to [...]
Intel X25-M SSDs Performance Degrades Over Time
With the recent discovery by Anandtech that JMicron-based cheap SSDs can introduce multi-second lockup/lag in a system and that Intel’s ultra-pricey X25-M SSDs didn’t suffer from the problem, it was looking like folks that had to have an SSD and were willing to pay for it had a chance at salvation… not so fast. PC [...]
Slow Printing with ReadyNAS NV+
Every since I got my Infrant (now NETGEAR) ReadyNAS NV+, I’ve been using the Print Server feature of it to hook my HP LaserJet 1200 series printer to it. Unfortunately, it’s always exhibited strange printing behavior, more specifically: From most applications, the first time I try and print, the Print job/command is completely ignored. So [...]
Not All SSDs Are Equal – Some Will Kill Your Computer's Performance
Not all solid state drives (SSDs) are created equal it seems. Taking a quick glance at the Newegg SSD product listings for 32GB drives, you can get an idea that there is something different between a $300 OCZ and a $600 Intel SSD. A big thanks to Patrick Norton for sending this information in — [...]
Screenshot Tour of Windows 7: Libraries, Taskbar, IE8 and the New Paint Application!
Introduction When the public beta of Windows 7 was announced, we did like everyone else and ran over to the Windows 7 site to download it (ISO Download Links: 32-bit, 64-bit). After getting it installed and spending some time with it, our overall take away so far are the following things: Windows 7 is a [...]
Ruby 1.9 Quick Speed Test
It has been a while since I’ve had a chance to play with Ruby, and with 1.9.1 coming out in January I figured I’d go ahead and install 1.9 to get a feel. Since speed was always an issue in 1.8 I figured I’d re-run my fib.rb script to find the fibonacci number for 35. [...]
Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 – The PS3 Starts to Show Its Power
It’s about flipping time, but given the new trailers out for Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 from the VGA’s, I’d have to say that the PS3 is started to show it’s legs. Give them a peek: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Trailer God of War 3 Trailer
JaxaFX 1.0 Released – Not a Great First User Experience
Please keep in mind I’m wearing my “Joe average user” hat that this platform is suppose to target as a delivery platform (and simplify developer’s lives in the process). I’ll admit that I’ve always had trouble with the Java plugin and Firefox on my old Windows XP SP2 desktop, Windows XP SP3 laptop and my [...]
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