Microsoft pledges love and money to open source | The Register - Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project. Why India Will Beat China - An entrenched and vibrant democracy will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically Rush Plays Rock Band Backstage at Colbert | Comedy Central Insider - The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans - So, when Rush was backstage at The Colbert Report last week, they played "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band and now there's video of it gxp -Google XML Pages - GXP is a templating system used to generate XML/SGML markup (most often HTML). Support for multiple languages - currently Java Ext JS - Ext GWT Grid, Grid Plugins, and EditableGrid - Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor | Register Hardware - It's Windows Vista's fault that solid-state storage isn't performing as well as its proponents predicted. So said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, but at least he didn't go as far as saying it's Microsoft's problem to fix. VMware to offer low-footprint ESX hypervisor free | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-22 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service - VMware said Tuesday it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market. InfoQ: Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS - In this interview from QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, the move towards open source at Adobe, how to integrate Flex with existing applications, and the challenges of integrating Rich Internet Applicatio Copy your files faster with TeraCopy - TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives. Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine - A Java Champion since September 2005, Kirk Pepperdine is a primary contributor to javaperformancetuning.com, which is widely regarded as the premier site for Java performance tuning information, and is the coauthor of Ant Developer's Handbook.
Tags: adobe, air, apache, application, article, BlazeDS, china, copy, esx, ExtGWT, extjs, flex, flex3, foss, framework, freemarker, freeware, fsf, funny, google, gpl, grid, gwt, india, java, library, microsoft, Music, opensource, optimization, performance, poi, presentation, programming, rockband, rush, software, solidstate, ssd, template, utilities, video, videogames, virtualization, Vista, vmware, web, windowsPosts tagged as:
optimization
Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 4th
Pearware Blog : Improving Java web site performance with asset caching - In this post, I’ll be talking about a solution I developed at my day job to improve the performance of our web site by allowing the browser to cache JavaScript, CSS, and image files Who Will Tell the People? - New York Times - We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV The All-White Elephant in the Room - New York Times - Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race. Headius: The Power of the JVM - The future is definitely looking awesome for dynamic languages on the JVM. And languages like Groovy and JRuby are proving it. How Has Functional Programming Influenced Your Coding Style? - Functional programming languages are enjoying a renaissance. Even if not intending to use a functional language for daily work, learning such a language can improve one's programming style Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor - (37signals) - Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-m Java Persistence 2.0 Early Draft Available - Linda DeMichiel's Blog - We've just released the Early Draft of the Java Persistence 2.0 specification, so I thought it would be a good time to report on some of the work we've been doing in the JSR 317 Expert Group. InfoQ: Flex, AIR and AS3 Flex Gain Code Coverage Utilities - Last month Joe Berkovitz announced the initial experimental release of Flexcover, an open-source code coverage tool suite for Flex, AIR and AS3 For all you know, it's just another Java library - David Pollak's Blog - Bottom line… to anyone other than the folks with hands in the code and the folks who have to recruit and manage them, "For all you know, it's just another Java library." Common Solutions for T-SQL Problems - Home - Some of the Moderators, Answerers, and MVPs have gotten together to create a new resource to supplement the Forums; it's called SQLExamples. We just started it a few weeks ago so it's still very much in its infancy
Tags: air, as3, bestpractices, bytecode, cache, caching, code, compiler, database, development, elections, emma, filter, flex, functional, globalization, groovy, health, J2EE, java, javascript, jpa, jpa2.0, jruby, jvm, jython, lifehacks, media, microsoft, obama, optimization, ORM, performance, persistence, politics, productivity, programming, scala, servlet, sleep, SQL, sqlserver, tools, tsql, web, workRelated posts
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Daily del.icio.us for March 22nd through March 25th
SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place - Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful an Save the Developers! Stop Using Internet Explorer 6 - There is a scourge on the Web. It is called Internet Explorer 6. Even though IE7 has been around for more than two years, IE6 still represents 31% of all browsers out there (versus only 22 % for IE7 and 36.5 % for Firefox). Amazon's cloud computing service fuels startup's launch | InfoWorld | News | 2008-03-25 | By Jon Brodkin, Network World - A startup called Elastra is launching Tuesday with software that helps customers build database management systems and other applications that can be deployed on top of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments to Grow 11 Percent in 2008, Market Could Fall Victim to Weaker Global Economy - Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to total 293 million units in 2008, up 10.9 percent from 2007 shipments of 264 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. However, analysts warned that growth could fall into single digits if global economic headwinds st Microsoft partners with open source Jaspersoft, Sourcesense | Open Source | ZDNet.com - Microsoft and Jaspersoft are working together to ensure that Jasper’s business intelligence software suite runs well on the latest editions of Windows and SQL Server. The ’80s Video That Pops Up, Online and Off - New York Times - For rickrolling, the duck was replaced with the 20-year-old Astley video, and in the last year it has become a hugely successful “meme,” the Internet’s word for an idea repeated across the Web. The video from yougotrickrolled.com has been viewed mor Roundtable: The state of open source | InfoWorld | News | March 24, 2008 | By Jason Snyder - Any endeavor rooted in community is bound to spark passionate debate. After all, without contention, how else to determine the best way forward? Since its emergence, open source has embodied this spirit. Part defiant, part self-reliant, and often outspoke ETL for Free-Form Data - SQL Server Central - Would you like to learn a handy little process for extracting, transforming and loading data fields from a free-form source like a web page or word processing document into something structured like a staging table? Asynchronous HTTP and Comet architectures - Java World - In this article, Gregor Roth takes a wider view of asynchronous HTTP, explaining its role in developing high-performance HTTP proxies and non-blocking HTTP clients, as well as the long-lived HTTP connections associated with Comet. Ext.ux.grid.RowActions - RowActions Plugin for Ext 2.x - Beta1 by Saki - RowActions plugin allows you to add icons in a grid that you want to bind actions to: delete row, edit row, whatever. It displays an icon and fires two events: beforeaction (return false to cancel) and action (here you put the action you want to execute) Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism - Loved this comment 
- I hadn't realized how unhappy I was until I watched Office Space and my wife said, "That seems like your job". I soon switched jobs
Tags: adobe, air, ajax, amazon, analysis, asynchronous, browser, browsers, business, calendar, campaign, comet, computer, data, database, datawarehouse, developer, development, ec2, etl, ext, extension, extjs, firefox, flash, flex, flex3, fortify, gartner, gears, GMail, google, googlegears, grid, guide, howto, httpclient, Humor, ibm, ide, ie, ie6, ie7, jasperreports, java, javascript, Linux, microsoft, mobile, mysql, offline, opensource, optimization, outlook, pc, plugin, pocketpc, reports, ria, rickrolled, s3, saas, sales, science, servlet, software, sqlserver, ssis, standards, sync, teamwork, tools, tutorial, ubuntu, video, web, Web2.0, webdesign, webdev, windows, xensource, xml, xsd, xsl - I hadn't realized how unhappy I was until I watched Office Space and my wife said, "That seems like your job". I soon switched jobsRelated posts
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Daily del.icio.us for March 4th through March 7th
Software bugtraps | Software that makes software better | Economist.com - Jonathan Pincus, an expert on software reliability who recently left Microsoft Research to become an independent consultant, has observed that “the key issues [in programming] relate to people and the way they communicate and organise themselves.” FAQ - Grid - Ext JS Forums - Here is some lessons learned / compiled questions from some of the repetitive questions posted in the forums about grids. Typically people ask the same line of questions (I guess they don't search the forums) and the responses are typically fairly similar Google Calendar Sync: Getting Started - Google Calendar Sync allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You'll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency. Staying on top of your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlo Data Warehousing - I'm going to explain OLTP, data warehousing, and OLAP. Kiss that ghetto post-doc goodbye and watch big companies line up to pay you $300/hour to romance their most critical data. Optimize A Fresh Ubuntu Installation - Wired How-To Wiki - You've just download the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu Linux and it didn't cost you a thing. You breezed through the installation and a brand new desktop is staring you in the face — now what? Adobe Floating on AIR - eWeek - At the Adobe Engage 08 event in San Francisco Feb. 25, eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft spoke with Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about AIR and a host of other issues. Google Gears on Mobile Devices - Google Gears API - Google Code - Google Gears is now available on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. Google Gears works in exactly the same way on a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device as it does on a desktop PC. If you've already written an application that uses Google Gears, your application wil
Tags: adobe, air, analysis, calendar, data, database, datawarehouse, development, extjs, flash, flex, flex3, fortify, gears, GMail, google, googlegears, guide, howto, ibm, ide, javascript, Linux, microsoft, mobile, offline, opensource, optimization, outlook, pocketpc, ria, science, software, sync, teamwork, tools, tutorial, ubuntu, windowsRelated posts
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Daily del.icio.us for Aug 16, 2007 through Aug 21, 2007
Struts2 Tutorials - Several tutorials are available to help you get started with the framework, from all-purpose "soup to nuts" tutorials to specialty tutorials on portlets and database access. GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released - GnilronEye 1.1, a java-based system monitoring solution, is now available for download. GnilronEye 1.1 introduces an advanced http-monitoring feature and a new report feature that include sgraphs of the monitored items. A CSS styled table version 2 | Veerle's blog - In 2005 I wrote an article about styling a table with CSS. After receiving so many requests I finally decided to give in and write another tutorial. Scrollovers - A New Way of Linking - Scrollovers are a way to quickly and easily add flair to your web pages, giving your users an experience they weren't expecting. Death by numbers - Los Angeles Times - We're obssessed with plane crashes and bridge collapses, yet we pay little attention to the stuff that kills the rest of us. Sun set on server business? | Open Source | ZDNet.com - In all the hullaballoo over Sun?s agreement to support Solaris 10 on IBM hardware I have yet to read one obvious fact. This is part of Sun?s exit strategy from the server business. Ajaxian » YUI Compressor: The latest minification tool - The YUI Compressor is a new JavaScript minifier. Its level of compaction is higher than the Dojo compressor, and it is as safe as JSMin. Tests on the YUI library have shown savings of about 18% compared to JSMin and 10% compared to the Dojo compressor Tutorials - Using Java Persistence API Within a Visual Web Application - Using NetBeans IDE 6.0 and the Visual Web tools, you can write applications that connect to database tables using the Java Persistence API (JPA) in addition to the Visual Web data provider components. Enterprise Java Community: Manage test data for integration tests using Spring and DBunit - This article will look at configuring integration tests using Spring and DBUnit so that test data is inserted into the database before every test. This article also looks at a utility to export/import test data in the database using DBunit. How to Get the Best Performance Out of a Java Persistence Implementation : Enterprise Tech Tips - If you are switching over to the Java Persistence API, be aware of the numerous options and decisions you have to make to boost your application's performance. From Cache size, Pools to modes of operation, Rahul Biswas takes you through the steps. (via Th Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate - The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 has arrived! The core team is continuing its tradition of bringing thoughtful incremental upgrades to the core APIs in addition to performance improvements and bug fixes. Keep reading for some of the highligh Citrix makes bold virtualization move with XenSource acquisition, muddies waters with Microsoft | Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com - Citrix Systems Inc. today roared full throttle into the ever-expanding desktop virtualization arena, when it announced its intention to acquire XenSource, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. The news comes right on the heels of VMWare?s huge IPO pop.
Tags: accessibility, ajax, business, citrix, compressor, css, dbunit, death, design, development, ejb, essay, framework, freeware, hardware, html, hypervisor, ibm, J2EE, java, javascript, jpa, jsp, junit, library, media, microsoft, monitoring, netbeans, optimization, performance, persistence, programming, prototype, scrollovers, software, solaris, spring, statistics, Struts, struts2, sun, table, tables, testing, tss, tutorial, virtualization, webdesign, xenRelated posts
Daily del.icio.us for Apr 13, 2007 through Apr 17, 2007
The 90th percentile: MyFaces: The emperor has no clothes - My last project is going into production in a couple of weeks, and it has been implemented using JSF. I started with JSF in good faith: it should be stable by now, it is blessed by Sun and included as the de facto web framework in JEE 5. James Ward's Blog » Blog Archive » My Recent Flex & Apollo Adventures - A while back Bruce Eckel and I recorded a screencast of us building a Flex application with Hibernate and XFire on the backend. I finally got around to packaging the code for that demo. You can get it from SourceForge. rakaz - Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files - Thanks to a small PHP script and some clever URL rewriting I now have an easy to maintain method to speed up the loading of pages that use many or large css and javascript files. Vitamin Features » Serving JavaScript Fast - The next generation of web apps make heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. We?ll show you how to make those apps responsive and quick. lightWindow - Another decent lightbox Javascript library (via Ajaxian) - After researching every single modal window, lightbox, slimbox, etc out there nothing fit the bill. Granted some of them were very nice but only fit a specific purpose Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2007-04-16 | By Andrew Binstock - IT's rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of software development projects it must complete Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson?s Response to Alex Payne?s Interview [dive into mark] - LAUGH OUT LOUD funny take from Mark Pilgrim, John Gruber style. Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours by Elliott Back - There?s no good reason for Wordpress or your site to be slow, except your own negligence. Cache everything. Monitor performance Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - Silverlight (previously codenamed "WPF/E") is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web. Java Community News - BEA Releases JRockit R27.2 with Java 6 Support - BEA's latest JVM release, JRockit R27.2, is the first implementation of the Java 6 VM. In addition to providing full Java 6 support, the latest JRockit VM includes many-fold performance improvements, especially for applications with short-lived objects. Enomalism : XEN Virtualized Server Management Console: Amazon EC2 Migration - The Enomalism Elastic migration module is a migration tool kit for the management and migration of virtual images between your local xen based enomalism environment and the remote Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Environment. Everybody Hates Don Imus - Frank Rich's brilliant column - Even in that short span, there?s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate Dev2Dev Online: Open Source and BEA - BEA believes in open source. We believe a blended strategy for application development and deployment?combining the best of open source and commercial software?provides important freedom and flexibility not available through all-or-nothing approaches Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit « - Over the years, I?ve accumulated a variety of tools that don?t take up much space but that come in handy when an emergency comes along. On the average day, I don?t need any of these - but when I do, I?m happy to have them. Here are my suggestions
Tags: adobe, ajax, architecture, backup, BEA, beehive, compression, css, development, dhh, don+imus, ec2, eclipse, emergency, flash, flex, framework, groovy, hardware, hibernate, hosting, Humor, imus, J2EE, java, java6, javascript, JRockit, jsf, jvm, language, lightbox, management, microsoft, mustang, myfaces, nytimes, opensource, optimization, performance, php, programming, prototype, python, restore, Ruby, RubyOnRails, scalability, silverlight, spring, survival, tips, tool, video, virtualization, web, webdesign, WebLogic, WordPress, wpf, xen, xfire Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours by Elliott Back - There?s no good reason for Wordpress or your site to be slow, except your own negligence. Cache everything. Monitor performance Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - Silverlight (previously codenamed "WPF/E") is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web. Java Community News - BEA Releases JRockit R27.2 with Java 6 Support - BEA's latest JVM release, JRockit R27.2, is the first implementation of the Java 6 VM. In addition to providing full Java 6 support, the latest JRockit VM includes many-fold performance improvements, especially for applications with short-lived objects. Enomalism : XEN Virtualized Server Management Console: Amazon EC2 Migration - The Enomalism Elastic migration module is a migration tool kit for the management and migration of virtual images between your local xen based enomalism environment and the remote Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Environment. Everybody Hates Don Imus - Frank Rich's brilliant column - Even in that short span, there?s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate Dev2Dev Online: Open Source and BEA - BEA believes in open source. We believe a blended strategy for application development and deployment?combining the best of open source and commercial software?provides important freedom and flexibility not available through all-or-nothing approaches Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit « - Over the years, I?ve accumulated a variety of tools that don?t take up much space but that come in handy when an emergency comes along. On the average day, I don?t need any of these - but when I do, I?m happy to have them. Here are my suggestionsRelated posts
Daily del.icio.us for Apr 03, 2007
From Java EE security to Acegi - The right way to protect your Web applications - This article is an in-depth introduction and comparison of Java EE security and Acegi. They both offer a variety of security services to make application security programming easier. The declarative and annotation-based programming methodologies let devel Microsoft Watch - Games & Consumer - What Apple DRM-Free Means to Microsoft - Apple will offer EMI music free of DRM for 30 cents more a track; album prices will remain the same. Apple makes the EMI catalog more attractive than other iTunes music in two ways: No DRM and higher encoding BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-30 | By Paul Krill - WebLogic Server builds on Spring internally, said Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and CEO of Interface21. "The architecture that they've adopted, building on Spring, enables them to move to a situation where Spring components can be deployed natively to We The Aquarium: GlassFish Components in BEA's WebLogic Server 10.0 - BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1 The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Media Viewer - Tim Berners-Lee explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data. JScrape - Simple Java & Xquery based HTML Scraping API - JScrape is a simple yet powerful java api for scraping (aka screen scraping) data from a web page using XQuery. This API makes it simple to pull data from other sources and maintain them in a simple way Dev2Dev Editor's Blog: WebLogic Server 10! WebLogic Portal 10 and Workshop for WebLogic 10 too! - BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA WebLogic Portal 10 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10 are all available now Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles - Yahoo! User Interface Blog - This article, co-written by Patty Chi, is the third in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage - Exposed! - Yahoo! User Interface Blog - This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance. Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests - Yahoo! User Interface Blog - This is the first in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance. Blogbody: IDEA Really is That Good - I consistently find myself trying to explain why IDEA is so good. This is my attempt to explain my favorite "features". I say "features" because many of these aren't the type of bullet-point features you might see in a direct comparison (ie: "EJB3 Support
Tags: acegi, apple, BEA, browser, cache, cookies, development, drm, eclipse, ejb3, glassfish, html, http, ide, idea, intellij, itunes, J2EE, j2ee5.0, java, jax-ws, jaxb2.0, jee5, jscrape, kodo, mp3, Music, openjpa, optimization, performance, programming, research, scraping, screenscraping, security, semanticweb, spring, spring2.0, SpringFramework, sso, video, web, webdev, WebLogic, weblogic10, xquery, yahoo, yuiRelated posts
Website Performance and Optimization
A couple of months ago, I noticed that I was getting pretty close to using up all of my monthly bandwidth allocation for my server and that was a surprise. I run several blogs that get quite a few hits but I didn't think I was anywhere near going over my 250 GB allotment. So I decided to spend a little time to optimize my server and figure out the best way to utilize what I had and optimize it to get the most performance out of my little box. Jeff Atwood's wonderful blog entry about Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage inspired me to write about my experience and what I ended up doing to squeeze the most out of my server.
I had done some of the obvious things that people typically do to minimize traffic to their site. First and foremost was outsourcing of my RSS feeds to FeedBurner. I've been using FeedBurner for several years now after I learned the hard way how badly programmed a lot of the RSS readers were out there. I had to ban several IP addresses as they were getting my full feed every 2 seconds - Hoping that was some bad configuration on their side but who knows. Maybe it was a RSS DOS attack :). After taking a little time to see what was taking up a lot of the bandwidth, I discovered several things that needed immediate attention. First and foremost was the missing HTTP compression. Looks like an Apache or PHP upgrade I did in the past few months had ended up disabling the Apache module for GZIP compression and so all the traffic was going out in text. HTTP Compression delivers amazing speed enhancements via file size reduction and most if not all browsers support compression and so I enabled compression for all content of type text/html and all CSS and JS files.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi158.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ft91%2Fvscarpenter%2Fbrowser-breakdown.png)
Some older browser don't handle JS and CSS compressed files but anything of IE6 seemed to handle JS/CSS compression just fine and my usage tracking (pictured above) indicated that most of my IE users were using IE 6 and above.
Enabling HTTP Compression compressed my blog index page by 78% resulting in a statistical performance improvement of almost 4.4x. While your mileage may vary, the resulting performance improvement got me on the Top20 column at GrabPERF almost every single day.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi158.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ft91%2Fvscarpenter%2Fgrabperf-org.jpg)
Another issue I had was the number of images being loaded from my web server. As most of you already know, browsers will typically limit themselves to 2 connections per server and so if a webpage being loaded has 4 CSS files, 2 JS files and 10 images, you are loading a lot of content over those 2 connections. And so I used a simple CNAME trick to create an image.j2eegeek.com to complement www.j2eegeek.com and started serving images from image.j2eegeek.com. That did help and I considered doing something similar for CSS and JS files but decided instead to outsource image handling to Amazon's S3.
Amazon's S3 or Simple Storage Service is a highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that is fast and relatively inexpensive. S3 allows you to create a 'bucket', which is essentially a folder that must have a globally unique name and cannot have any sub-buckets or directories and so it's basically emulates a flat directory structure. Everything you put in your bucket and make publically available is accessible via http using the URL http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/itemname.png. Amazon's S3 Web Service also allows you to call it using the HTTP Host header and so the URL above would become http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/itemname.png. You can take this further if you have access to your DNS server. In my case, I created a bucket in S3 called s3.j2eegeek.com. I then created a CNAME in my DNS for s3.j2eegeek.com and pointed it to s3.amazonaws.com. And presto - s3.j2eegeek.com resolves to essentially http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.j2eegeek.com/. I then used John Spurlock's NS3 Manager to get my content onto S3. NS3 Manager is a simple tool (windows only) to transfer files to/from an Amazon S3 storage account, as well as manage existing data. It is an attempt to provide a useful interface for some of the most basic S3 operations: uploading/downloading, managing ACLs, system metadata (e.g. content-type) and user metadata (custom name-value pairs). In my opinion, NS3 Manager is the best tool out there for getting data in and out of S3 and I have used close to 20 web based, browser plug-in and desktop applications.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi158.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ft91%2Fvscarpenter%2Famazon-usage.png)
In addition, I also decided to try out a couple of PHP Accelerators out there to see if I could squeeze a little more performance out of my web server. Compile caches are a no-brainer and I saw decent performance improvement in my PHP applications. I blogged about this topic in a little more detail and you can read that if you care about PHP performance.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi158.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ft91%2Fvscarpenter%2Fapc-php-cache-details.png)
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi158.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ft91%2Fvscarpenter%2Fapc-php-cache.png)
The last thing I did probably had the biggest impact after enabling HTTP compression and that was moving my Tomcat application server off my current Linux box and moving it to Amazon's EC2. Amazon's EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud is a virtualized cloud of computing available to you for $0.10 per hour of CPU utilization. I've been playing around with EC2 for a while now and just started using it for something real. I have tons of notes that I taken during my experimentation with EC2 where I took the stock Fedora Core 4 images from Amazon and made that server into my Java application server running Tomcat and Glassfish. I also created my own Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.4 image and deployed them as my server. My current AMI running my Java applications is a Fedora Core 6 image and I am hoping to get RHEL 5.0 deployed in the next few weeks but all of that will be a topic for another blog.
In conclusion, the HTTP Compression offered me the biggest reduction in bandwidth utilization. And it is so easy to setup on Apache, IIS or virtually any Java application server that is it almost criminal not to do so. Maybe that's overstating it a bit - but there are some really simple ways to optimize your website and you too can make your site hum and perform like you've got a cluster of servers behind your site.
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Daily del.icio.us for Mar 10, 2007 through Mar 15, 2007
video.onflex.org - video.onflex.org is maintained by Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick of Adobe. It is focused on providing videos about developing with Adobe Flex, ActionScript and Apollo. How to Use Java at a Startup - Cardsharp on Software - The embarrassment of riches in the Java Open Source movement makes it a slam dunk for startups. The fact that you can find an Open Source framework for every conceivable use means that you can focus on your core business instead of on plumbing InfoQ: JP Rangaswami on open source in the enterprise & the future of information - CIO JP Rangaswami explains how open source became a corporate IT strategy at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and why CIOs of major enterprises should open source for software development initiatives. JP also explains his vision of four pill Ajaxian » Compressed versions of Prototype - John-David Dalton has spent some time compressing Prototype in a couple of ways to keep your download time to a minimum. jsjuicer - jsjuicer is a free tool for safely reducing the size of your JavaScript files. Reducing the size and number of the JavaScript files included in a web page will enable it to load faster
Tags: adobe, Apollo, architecture, blog, compression, development, enterprise, flex, flex2, infoq, java, javascript, opensource, optimization, prototype, Ruby, RubyOnRails, startup, strategy, tutorial, videoRelated posts
Daily del.icio.us for Mar 09, 2007 through Mar 10, 2007
Ajaxian - Compressed versions of Prototype - John-David Dalton has spent some time compressing Prototype in a couple of ways to keep your download time to a minimum. jsjuicer - jsjuicer is a free tool for safely reducing the size of your JavaScript files. Reducing the size and number of the JavaScript files included in a web page will enable it to load faster SDN Channel - Spotlight on Open Source - Did you know that Sun contributes more than $200 million per year of intellectual property to the open source movement, in dozens of open source projects? The company?s historical contribution tops $2 billion (Kudos to Sun) www.hungtang.com - Java and IDEA: deadly tandem - I have been doing Java development for about 6 years now. It?s amazing to think that I have stuck with it for this long but I strongly believe Intellij IDEA has a lot to do with my seemingly never-ending devotion. Simply put, this product rocks?just l FiveRuns - Web 2.0 Systems Management - FiveRuns makes monitoring, analyzing, reporting and predicting the behavior of critical business systems painless. A Roundup for "Developers, Developers, Developers…" - So, I decided to make a compilation of products that developers may find useful. There?s a little bit of everything in here - some are still in private beta, but still worth mentioning
Tags: compression, development, foss, ide, idea, intellij, java, javascript, management, monitoring, opensource, optimization, programming, prototype, rails, software, sun, sysadmin, tools, Web2.0