Posts tagged with performance
If you want to learn Varnish Thijs Feryn wrote a book for you. It's free to download until 7th March 2017.
Getting Strated with Varnish Cache is a technical book about the Varnish caching technology. Varnish is a so-called reverse caching proxy that acts as an intermediary between the browser and the webserver. Varnish stores HTTP responses and serves them to the browser, without accessing the backend for every request. This causes a massive speed increase.
Apart from our open source work, we do client work at Spatie as well. Over the years we've learned that one of the most critical moments of a project is when it is going live. No matter how you confident you are about the correctness of the code base there are so many big and little things that…
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For a project we're working on at Spatie we're expecting high traffic. That's why we spent some time researching how to improve the request speed of a Laravel application and the amount of requests a single server can handle. There are many strategies and services you can use to speed up a site. In…
David Gilbertson made a lighting fast site and wrote a fantastic article about it.
Writing a fast website is like raising a puppy, it requires constancy and consistency (both over time and from everyone involved). You can do a great job keeping everything lean and mean, but if you get sloppy and use an 11 KB library to format a date and let the puppy shit in the bed just one time, you’ve undone a lot of hard work and have some cleaning up to do.
https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7
On the Blackfire.io blog Julien Pauli peeks behind the curtains of PHP. In the five part series he explains how you should write your code to make the best use of the internal optimizations present in PHP 7.
This blog series will show you what changed inside the Zend engine between PHP 5 and PHP 7 and will detail how you, as a developer, may effectively use the new internal optimizations. We are taking PHP 5.6 as a comparison basis. Often, it is just a matter of how things are written and presented to the engine. Performance must be taken care of when critical code is written. By changing some little things, you can make the engine perform much faster, often without losing other aspects such as readability or debugging control.
https://blog.blackfire.io/php-7-performance-improvements-packed-arrays.html
Sebastian De Deyne, my colleague at Spatie, wrote a very nice overview of all different methods in Vue to define a template.
This article isn't about Vue's template syntax, but about where and how to define your templates. I wrote this because at the time of writing there aren't really resources that consolidate all the different manners to manage your templates.I've divided the different ways to define templates in three different categories, each with their own drawbacks:
- Writing templates that compile at runtime (lesser performance)
- Using single file .vue components (requires a build step)
- Manually writing render functions (pure JavaScript, no html-like template syntax)
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/dealing-with-templates-in-vue-20
A fully qualified function name is a little bit faster than a non-qualified one. Toon Verwerft explains it all in his lastest blogpost.
Today, a little conversation on Twitter escalated rather quickly. Apparently PHP runs function calls differently depending on namespaced or non namespaced context. When calling functions in a namespaced context, additional actions are triggered in PHP which result in slower execution. In this article, I'll explain what happens and how you can speed up your application.
http://veewee.github.io/blog/optimizing-php-performance-by-fq-function-calls/
Today a new major version of our homegrown crawler was released. The crawler is used to power our http-status-check, laravel-sitemap and laravel-link-checker packages. A new major feature is the greatly improved crawling speed. This was accomplished by leveraging multiple concurrent requests. Let's…
At this years Chrome Dev Summit Jake Archibald gave an excellent talk on some new features that are coming to the service worker. In case you don't know, a service worker is a piece of JavaScript that sits between the network request sent by the JavaScript in your browser and the browser itself. A common use case for a service is to display a custom page when there is no internet connection available instead of showing the default error message in your browser. And of course you can use a service worker to have a high degree of control on how things are cached.
I really like Jake's presentation style in general. He always injects a lot of humour. This time he's presenting in a tuxedo, with no shoes on and he uses a Wii Controller to control his slides. Go Jake!
A very interesting part of the talk is when he touches on the time needed to display a page. Turns out a full web request can be a faster than a fancy single page application. Watch that segment on YouTube by clicking here.
Or you can choose to just watch the whole presentation in the video below.
Another big boy on the web upgraded to PHP 7. If you're not yet on the train heading for PHP7-ville, best get your ticket soon, you won't regret it.
At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software. Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.
https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/152998126990/php-7-at-tumblr
Last friday Taylor Otwell tweeted an easy to use memoization function called once: Wanted a slick way to generalize class method memoization. Y'all don't even want to know how it works. ? ? pic.twitter.com/xRJAY1C14y— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) November 4, 2016 Taylor was kind…
Varnish is a piece of software that, amongst other things, can make your website much faster. In a new post on his blog, Mattias Geniar tells you all about it.
Varnish can do a lot of things, but it's mostly known as a reverse HTTP proxy. It brands itself as an HTTP accelerator, making HTTP requests faster by caching them. ... Varnish is usually associated with performance, but it greatly increases your options to scale your infrastructure (load balancing, failover backends etc) and adds a security layer right out of the box: you can easily let Varnish protect you from the httpoxy vulnerability or slowloris type attacks.
https://ma.ttias.be/varnish-explained/
Be sure to watch Mattias' excellent talk he gave at this years Laracon:
Jani Tarvainen explains where PHP is heading performance-wise.
PHP 7.0 was a leap in performance that came with very easy adoption. Simply verify compatibility with the version and upgrade your server environment. Speeding up many older architecture apps like WordPress and Mediawiki by a factor of two is a testament to backwards compatibility.In 7.1, the language runtime will continue to make modest improvements, but bigger gains will have to wait. One of these opportunities for a bigger improvement is the JIT implementation that is now bound for PHP 8.0
https://www.symfony.fi/entry/whats-in-store-for-php-performance
Generated columns where introduced in MySQL 5.7. In the latest post on her blog Gabriela D'Ávila explains the feature.
There are two types of Generated Columns: Virtual and Stored. ... Consider using virtual columns for data where changes happens in a significant number of times. The cost of a Virtual Column comes from reading a table constantly and the server has to compute every time what that column value will be. ... You should consider using Stored Columns for when the data doesn’t change significantly or at all after creation,
https://blog.gabriela.io/2016/10/17/understanding-generated-columns/
If you like the post, be sure to check out Gabriela's excellent talk at Laracon EU as well:
I've seen two different tips for speeding up your tests in Laravel in the past week and thought I'd share them with you. For me, they made a significant impact on the speed of my tests.
https://driesvints.com/blog/two-tips-to-speedup-your-laravel-tests/
Jordan Scales examined the contents of the node_modules directory a discovered a lot of junk.
While code bloat continues to slow down our websites, drain our batteries, and make “npm install” slow for a few seconds, many developers like myself have decided to carefully audit the dependencies we bring into our projects. It’s time we as a community stand up and say enough is enough, this community belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of JavaScript developers with great hair.I decided to document my experiences in auditing my projects’ dependencies, and I hope you find the following information useful.
As a user I've pretty much turned my back to Facebook, but boy must it be interesting to work at that scale. Here's how Facebook built their mobile device lab.
... We needed to be able to run tests on more than 2,000 mobile devices to account for all the combinations of device hardware, operating systems, and network connections that people use to connect on Facebook. Today, in our Prineville data center, we have a mobile device lab — outfitted with a custom-built rack — that allows us to run tests on thousands of phones. The process of building a lab in our data center wasn't a direct path, and we learned a lot along the way...
https://code.facebook.com/posts/300815046928882/the-mobile-device-lab-at-the-prineville-data-center/
I stumbled on this story via Bram.us. Subscribe to the RSS feed of that site if you haven't done so already.
Frank De Jonge, member of the PHP League and author/maintainer of Flysystem, was facing a world of pain with ElasticSearch. Luckily the story has an happy ending. Read all about his journey on his blog.
For a client project we are using ElasticSearch (ES) as one of our read-models. The use-case was pretty straight forward and the amount of data was super small. However, our problems were pretty big. It got to a point where we had to reboot our cluster periodically to prevent it from crashing. So, what was going on? Let's dig in.
https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/how-a-20mb-data-set-brought-down-a-14gb-elasticsearch-cluster/
Laravel 5.3, which will be released at this years Laracon US, has some new very handy functionality to work with MySQL 5.7 JSON columns. In a post on his site Matt Stauffer demonstrates the new API.
While Laravel has had the ability to cast your data to and from JSON since version 5.0, it was previously just a convenience—your data was still just stored in a TEXT field. But MySQL 5.7 introduced an actual JSON column type.Laravel 5.3 introduces a simple syntax for lookups and updates based on the value of specific keys in your JSON columns.
https://mattstauffer.co/blog/new-json-column-where-and-update-syntax-in-laravel-5-3
If you're going to use this functionality, you should also read Mohamed Said's post on how to improve performance by using MySQL generated columns.
JSON columns cannot be indexed. You can work around this restriction by creating an index on a generated column that extracts a scalar value from the JSON column.
http://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709/
A few weeks ago the Frontend United Conference was held in Ghent, Belgium. The entire development team at Spatie attended the conference. Though it certainly was fun to go to a conference with the entire team we were left a bit underwhelmed. Some of the talks were very short and some speakers seemed a bit unprepared.
The organisers have begun posting video's of all sessions to YouTube. In my opinion the following three talks rose above the rest.
1: Harry Roberts gave a talk were he demonstrated that programming best practices apply to writing CSS as well.
2: Christian Heillman talked about web obesity and gave a few tips on how to optimize the size of images.
3: Mathias Bynens showed how unicode support in JavaScript is broken and what common pitfalls are when working with special characters. Rather than just complaining about it, he offered some kick ass self-made solutions.
(the video for this session hasn't been posted yet, this is a video of the same talk at another conference)
