Get more speed out of your external drives with a simple hack. Windows configures your external drives for easy removal, but for those of us who leave them plugged in for long periods of time, there's a simple way to boost performance.

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Move your cache and save disk space. Firefox doesn't have an obvious way to move your cache, but with the help of today's Tekzilla Daily, you can point it to any folder you choose.

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Performance on Rails, Jeremy Kemper (37signals).

About Jeremy Kemper
Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat) is a programmer at 37signals hailing from Pasadena, California. Hot on the heels of DHH, he has been the most active contributor to Rails. He’s knee deep in pretty much all aspects of the framework and one of the top batters against new, incoming tickets.

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Three companies recently collaborated to use DTrace, a powerful open source process introspection tool to find and fix a substantial Rails latency issue.

Teams from Joyent and Twitter and DTrace developer Bryan Cantrill from Sun joined forces to spend a day looking in detail at how Ruby processes behave within a Rails production environment. The purpose of the collaboration was to use the dynamic tracing framework to fix a latency issue observed in Twitter. DTrace is one of the components of the open source project OpenSolaris. It is designed for forensic investigation of processes, and as such is perfectly suited for the inspection and monitoring of Ruby processes running Rails applications.

During their analysis, the joint team discovered that the raising and catching of particular set of exceptions within Rails caused large amounts of CPU time to be consumed generating back-traces hundreds of frames long. Through the detection and removal of these exceptions, the latency of a particular class of Rails request-response cycles was substantially improved.

Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman is vocal about the benefits of DTrace:

We use DTrace all the time in identifying performance issues in our customer's and in our own applications.

However, he believes that there is still room for improvement, and that the introspection into Ruby processes that DTrace offers is still not deep enough. Patches for versions 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 of Ruby are currently being worked on that will afford DTrace with an even greater ability to peer inside Ruby's internals. Jason also believes that DTrace will continue to generate a tremendous amount of insight into production Rails and Ruby processes. With ports in development for FreeBSD and planned for OS X Leopard, DTrace is no longer an exclusive tool for Solaris users.

Interestingly, not only is this a success story for open source tools being used to improve open source frameworks, it is also a success story for the process of open source software development. Within 11 hours of a ticket being filed, it had been accepted by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson himself, and incorporated into the latest version of Rails for immediate use.

Speaker: Jason Hoffman
Jason A. Hoffman is a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month.

Joyent is dedicated to the singular mission that developers should be able to start at a small scale and flex to a global scale with minimal friction. Joyent is among the world's largest OpenSolaris installations and while supporting all unix-based languages and data stores, Joyent's products have included the first production support of Ruby on Rails, inclusion of the ZFS file system, and Joyent's DTrace-enabled Ruby ships on MacOS X Leopard and soon on OpenSolaris.

Jason is a systems scientist with BS and MS degrees from UCLA, and a PhD from UCSD, and is an expert in scalable architectures. He has applied his knowledge and experience from the Web to Games to Computational Chemistry, Proteomics and Cancer biology.

Google Tech Talks
July, 17 2008

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In this talk I will introduce neverblock http://www.espace.com.eg/neverblock. a new Ruby library that enables doing non-blocking IO in a transparent manner. I will show how it can be used to transparently gain IO parallelism in your Ruby (and Rails) web applications.

The talk will include a brief introduction to Ruby1.9 Fibers and how they are used in NeverBlock to achieve transparent concurrency

About W. Idris Yasser
Yasser is a technical lead at eSpace. He has more than five years of experience in software engineering. Specifically passioned with theory and algorithms. Working on his masters thesis on the "Invariance of Huffman Codes" problem. He initially worked with C++, , moved on to developing for mobile devices(PPC's), and then had been doing J2EE applications for two years. Currently, for almost a year and a half, he has been leading teams of Ruby on Rails web 2.0 projects and also contributing to eSpace's iPhone development efforts.

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GTAC 2008: The New Genomics - Software Development at Petabyte Scale

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Matt Wood

Google Tech Talks
October 23, 2008

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GTAC 2008: Using Cloud Computing to Automate Full-Scale System Tests

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Marc-Elian Begin

Google Tech Talks
October 23, 2008

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This talk will begin with an overview of the Computer Systems group within the College of Engineering and IT at The Australian National University. These fall under the Themes of Bio-Engineering, Robotics, Advanced Runtime Systems, Performance Analysis, Parallel Processing, Operating Systems. Depending on audience interest, projects under the latter three themes will be discussed in detail. These include:

OpenMP for Contemporary Clusters: state-of-the-art for distributed shared memory based systems, the handling of heterogeneity and utilization of advanced networking technologies (Infinband).

High Performance Numerical Computing on Service-Oriented Architectures: this work involves the extension of the Symphony programming paradigm (Platform Computing), originally developed for financial applications running on enterprise grids. The desirable properties of this model include inherent load balancing in a heterogeneous environment, fault tolerance and relative simplicity of programming. The challenge arises in enabling compute tasks to effectively communicate with low overheads, while retaining most of these advantages.

Virtualized HPC Clusters: Virtualization has many advantages in the context of a data center with a heterogeneous cluster of sub-clusters. Work on evaluating the performance of virtualized communication configurations is described, together with a framework for scheduling for taking advantage of virtual machine migration, based on the Xen hypervisor.

Simulation and Performance Evaluation Frameworks for NUMA Clusters: We discuss a standard and detailed design for multiprocessor computer simulation. Both can be parallelized and a multiprocessor host, with the performance being limited by the inherent imbalance in the work required to simulate each CPU for a fixed interval of simulated time. We will also describe why issues in validation are particularly problematic. Recent work includes incorporating these techniques into dynamic binary translation frameworks (Valgrind) and extending them to cluster computers.

Multicore Computing: With the recent donation of an UltraSPARC T2 by Sun Microsystems, we will discuss current work and future plans to expand multicore computing into our teaching and research programs.

Speaker: Dr Peter Strazdins, Australian National University
Peter is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He graduated with a PhD from the ANU in 1990 in the area of programmable systolic arrays, and from that time until 2002 was involved in the ANU-Fujitsu CAP Program in Parallel Computing. He has worked in the areas of parallel linear algebra, multiprocessor computer simulation, performance evaluation and developing middleware and virtualization techniques for high performance computing.

Google Tech Talks
October 28, 2008

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Coconut is a developing system for high-assurance, high-performance software. It was used to develop a library of special functions for the Cell BE processor, which is distributed in the Cell BE SDK 3.0 as MASS. Average performance is 4X better than the alternative hand-tuned C library, SimdMath.

Coconut has been successful where patterns of efficient hardware-specific computation can be captured as higher-order functions and encoded in a Domain Specific Language embedded in Haskell. Patterns include efficient control structures not expressible in C, e.g., the MultiLoop, and efficient uses of SIMD instructions which require significant compile-time computation for pattern specialization. Some patterns interact with a novel instruction scheduler called Explicitly Staged Software Pipelining, based on a min-cut approach, which outperforms SWING modulo scheduling in our tests.

A less developed aspect of Coconut is the parallel production of proofs of correctness along with executables. Current work aims to prove only limited properties about programs---the ones most likely to be broken---creative use of SIMD instructions, and parallelization. Coconut intermediate code is represented as nested code (hyper)graphs. At the lowest level, we transform acyclic loop bodies to remove the effect of SIMDization, and produce machine and/or human readable specifications. This has been used to verify opaque patterns of optimizing linear algebra for SIMD processors.

Such code graphs are embedded in higher levels containing control flow, first single-threaded control flow optimized for ILP, and then parallel control-flow, optimized to hide communication latency. At this level control flow is restricted to allow peak utilization of multi-core hardware, but enable efficient compile-time verification of soundness. Soundness, in this context, means that the parallelized program can be transformed into a code graph without synchronizing control flow, because every execution can be shown to produce the same result. Think of it as reducing the parallel debugging effort to the single-threaded debugging problem by eliminating the non-determinism inherent in parallel code. I will give a formal language description of the language, and the O(n) algorithm which proves soundness and produces the equivalent ``single threaded'' code graph.

Speaker: Christopher Anand
Christopher Anand is a professor of Computing and Software at McMaster University. His main research areas are software correctness, high performance computation, and automatic code generation.

He has also founded the company Optimal Computational Algorithms to provide hardware-specific libraries for scientific applications on novel architectures.

Google Tech Talks
March, 7 2008

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The online learning framework captures a wide variety of learning problems. The setting is as follows - in each round, we have to choose a point from some fixed convex domain. Then, we are presented a convex loss function, according to which we incur a loss. The loss over T rounds is simply the sum of all the losses. The aim of most online learning algorithm is to minimize *regret* : the difference of the algorithm's loss and the loss of the best fixed decision in hindsight. Unfortunately, in situations where the loss function may vary a lot, the regret is not a good measure of performance. We define *adaptive regret*, a notion that is a much better measure of how well our algorithm is adapting to the changing loss functions. We provide a procedure that converts any standard low-regret algorithm to one that provides low adaptive regret. We use an interesting mix of techniques, and use streaming ideas to make our algorithm efficient. This technique can be applied in many scenarios, such as portfolio management, online shortest paths, and the tree update problem, to name a few.

Speaker: Seshadhri Comandur - Research Scientist - New Grad - Mountain View

Google Tech Talks
March, 14 2008

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All Rubyists know that in its current state, Ruby is slow. And our usual answer to critics is "it's fast enough." But there's no reason Ruby can't be a really fast language. New VMs are making Ruby faster, and we'll probably see Ruby get much faster over the next two or three years. But every Rubyist would benefit from an understanding of what's going on under the hood. This talk delves into the techniques that have been used to make dynamic languages fast, and explores how those techniques are being used by YARV, JRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, and others.

About Glenn Vanderburg
Glenn has been working with Ruby for eight years. He is a principal at Relevance, Inc.

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We have been living in the shadow of Moore's law for many years. Transister sizes keep shrinking and processor speeds keep increasing. But technology seems to have hit a brick wall. Clock cycles have not been able to keep up with the shrinking transister. As a result, manufacturers have increased performance by putting more CPUs on a chip. But is today's software really able to deal with the concurrency demands of today's hardware? How will tomorrow's software have to change to take real advantage of this new push toward multi-core machines. This talk will take a look at current and future trends in software concurrency with respect to Ruby and other Languages.

About Jim Weirich
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

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Speed up web browsing in Windows Explorer with these snappy shortcuts; rename with a single keystroke, pull up the search tool, and more.

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Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist-at-large, is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. In this presentation, he discusses the importance of operations and performance.

Created by VelocityConf

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In this talk, Wolski presents Eucalyptus, an open source implementation of cloud computing that is interface compatible with Amazon.com’s EC2. The talk focuses on the design, the implementation tradeoffs that have been identified in implementing Eucalyptus as an exploratory tool, and the ways in which the tradeoffs have been addressed in the first version of the software.
Rich Wolski (University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Created by VelocityConf

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Web is built on a new software stack (varnish, rails, memcache, hadoop, etc.)

Trends:

1. 16 cores per socket for 2009, Sun, AMD and Intel on the same track. Clock rates will remain the same.
2. Application memory capacity increasing, working to get 1TB of RAM at commodity prices
3. ZFS and SSD, enterprise SSD, $0.08 per iops to compare to $2.43 per ios for HDD

[Sun is clearly attacking the storage market by pushing for commoditization of software, as opposed to proprietary systems such as 3PAR, EMC, etc.] Sun is building something like x4500, using an x4450 with 1 32GB ZIL SSD, 1 80GB SSD ad 5 slow SATA drives, same capex, 3 times the throughput.
John Fowler, Sun Microsystem

Bio
Fowler has been with Sun for more than 14 years with experience in systems and software development and corporate strategy. As Executive Vice President of Sun’s Systems Group, John Fowler is responsible for the delivery of all systems products including SPARC and x64-based servers as well as networking and disk and tape storage products. Prior to becoming the head of Sun’s Systems Group, Fowler was EVP of Sun’s x64 Systems Group focused on delivering industry standard network computing systems for Solaris, Linux and Windows.

Before leading Sun’s x64 initiative, Fowler was the Chief Technology Officer for Sun Microsystems’ Software organization. In his role as CTO for software, Fowler was responsible for overall technical strategy and alignment in addition to managing an advanced development group.

In other previous roles at Sun, Fowler was responsible for identifying leading technology trends and the companies creating these trends for minority investment and acquisition. His group took a forward view on both hardware and software technology developments, identifying companies that are complementary to Sun. He was involved in the acquisitions of Kealia, Inc. (Advanced Server Technology), Nauticus Networks (High-Performance Content Switch), Waveset Technologies, Inc. (Secure Identity Management), Pixo, Inc. (Centralized Data Services for Devices) and many others, resulting in continued innovation and product development for Sun.

Prior to his position with Sun’s investment group, Fowler was Director of Engineering for the Sun Software Development Tools organization. Throughout his career at Sun, he has also held a variety of engineering management positions within Java software, Solaris, Unix Desktop, and Graphics.

Created by VelocityConf

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Ignite War Stories Winner Kirrily Robert discusses open data.

Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. It has a similar ethos to a number of other "Open" movements and communities such as open source and open access. However these are not logically linked and many combinations of practice are found. The practice and ideology itself is well established (for example in the Mertonian tradition of science) but the term "Open Data" itself is recent. Much of the emphasis in this entry is on data from scientific research and from the data-driven web. In some cases Open Data may be considered as more properly Open Metadata and there is not yet a consistent formalisation.

Created by VelocityConf

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Since 1999, Akamai has built a large-scale distributed system with 30,000+ servers spread across 1000+ networks and 70+ countries. Akamai’s technology-at its core, applied mathematics and algorithms-manages the distribution of large content libraries and intelligently optimizes routes to accelerate dynamic sites and applications. This talk will focus on the design principles and architecture of the Akamai network and how it enables the Internet to deliver large libraries of HD content and accelerates dynamic transactions.
Harald Prokop (Akamai Technologies)

Created by VelocityConf

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HTTPWatch from Simon Perkins (Simtec Limited); Fiddler from Eric Lawrence (Microsoft); AOL PageTest from Eric Goldsmith (AOL, LLC); Profiling Dynamic Web Applications with Firebug from John J. Barton (IBM); moderated by Velocity co-chair Steve Souders of Google. Created by VelocityConf

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Summary
In this interview taken by InfoQ’s Ryan Slobojan, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Because MySpace is built almost entirely on the .NET Framework, Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.

Bio
Dan Farino is the Chief Systems Architect at MySpace.com where he is responsible for designing and implementing the infrastructure required to maintain the site's thousands of servers. Dan has designed and implemented many of MySpace.com's custom performance-monitoring, profiling and live-debugging tools.

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Just as people are beginning to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise “Ops-Free” computing. Soltero talks about the emergence of web operations as a discipline, and how cloud computing simply changes, instead of eliminating, the importance of web operations.
Javier Soltero (Hyperic, Inc.)

Created by VelocityConf

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Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) has more than 30 years of corporate and entrepreneurial leadership experience. Prior to Cassatt, he founded and was the first chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, the world’s leading infrastructure software company. Under his leadership, BEA became the fastest software firm ever to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue. Before BEA, he served as vice president of system software at Sun Microsystems, where his team transformed SunOS into the commercially successful Solaris operating system. While at Sun he also founded Sun’s Professional Services Division and co-founded Sun’s Federal Division. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the U.S. Air Force Academy and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Stanford University. He also has an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado.

Created by VelocityConf

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Steve Souders of Google and Jesse Robbins of the O'Reilly Radar welcome participants to the first-ever O'Reilly Velocity conference.

Created by VelocityConf

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Get an early look at KITE – the Keynote Internet Testing Environment. KITE tests and analyzes the performance of web applications from your desktop and locations around the world. KITE allows advanced scripting, detailed network performance and DOM analysis, and the ability to gather data from hundreds of geographic locations worldwide. In this preview the Keynote team demo KITE on some of the world’s most popular web sites and announce its Early Adopter Program for this new free product.
Vik Chaudhary and Abelardo Gonzalez (Keynote Systems)

Created by VelocityConf

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Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors: Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions or third-party performance monitoring systems (Gomez, Keynote, etc.) that will hit your site occasionally and report back component-level metrics (for a fee). Neither of these tools give you real-world information on what’s actually happening with your clients—how long are pages really taking to load, what’s the real cost of client-side execution, and what’s the impact of your loading or dependency chain. This talk will provide more information on the problem and the current solutions, and why we rolled our own, provide a technical overview of Jiffy, and show some real-world lessons we’ve had using it in our own production environment.
Scott Ruthfield (WhitePages.com)

Created by VelocityConf

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Google has built several large-scale storage systems on top of commodity machines and networking. This talk will briefly describe the storage infrastructure, highlight some of the approaches used to achieve reliability and availability, and discuss future challenges.
Sean Quinlan (Google, Inc.)

Created by VelocityConf

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Back in the day, only the foolhardy overclocked a PC. Today? It's practically expected for home builders. We walk you thru the basics of getting free performance from your processor.

No problem, Weston. Tho we don't have quite the same configuration as you do, the basics of overclocking, the fine art of tweaking your CPU, memory or GPU to get more performance than the part is rate for, hold pretty much the same, whether you've got an Intel or AMD processor.

Back in the day, only the brave and the foolhardy overclocked. Today, it's practically expected. Motherboard manufacturers have made it easy to overclock without puttering with tiny jumpers on the motherboard; it's all in the Bios, and most mobos will automatically reset if you push things too far. GPU manufacturers like Nvidia and ATI put overclocking tools in their drivers.

On the show we walk you thru the basics of turning up the Front Side Bus, along with the bus multiplier, since our processor's multiplier isn't locked... we ended up boosting our procesor 13% over stock. Not a huge gain, but nothing to sneeze at.

We also test our systm's stability using Prime95 for 30 minutes between each tweak to the BIOS.

Want to get more in depth with overclocking? We highly recommend the Extremetech Overclocking Guide, by Joel Durham, Jr. It's packed full of great info on overclocking your CPU and graphic card!

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Alright while this tip doesn't technically speed up web access with Firefox it does floor it when it comes to loading all those pics and texts on the screen.

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To evaluate an innovation in computer systems, performance analysts measure execution time or other metrics using one or more standard workloads. The performance analyst may carefully minimize the amount of measurement instrumentation, control the environment in which measurement takes place, and repeat each measurement multiple times. Finally, the performance analyst may use statistical techniques to characterize the data.

Unfortunately, even with such a responsible approach, the collected data may be misleading due to measurement bias and observer effect. Measurement bias occurs when the experimental setup inadvertently favors a particular outcome.

Observer effect occurs if data collection alters the behavior of the system being measured. This talk demonstrates that observer effect and measurement bias are (i) large enough to mislead performance analysts; and (ii) common enough that they cannot be ignored.

While these phenomenon are well known to the natural and social sciences this talk will demonstrate that research in computer systems typically does not take adequate measures to guard against measurement bias and observer effect.

Speaker: Amer Diwan
Amer Diwan is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before joining the University of Colorado, he was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for his PhD and at Stanford University for his postdoc. His research interests include tools and techniques for understanding program performance, programmer productivity tools, program analysis, memory management, and compiler optimizations.

Google Tech Talks
November 7, 2008

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Learn how to write faster Ruby applications and gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to scale Ruby. Topics covered:

• Processes & Threads
• Green vs Native Threading
• EventMachine
• Process Messaging
• Dropping to C
• Learning ruby-prof
• Speeding up Ruby code

This screencast also comes with a PDF with further resources to learn more about each topic.

Produced by Gregg Pollack

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Summary
In this presentation, Dan Pritchett addresses latency issues in web applications that should be dealt with from the beginning when the system is designed. Dan offers some practical solutions to latency.

Bio
Dan Pritchett is a Technical Fellow at eBay where he has been a member of the architecture team for the past four years. In this role, Dan interfaces with the strategy, business, product and technology teams across eBay Marketplaces, PayPal and Skype. Dan has over 20 years of experience at technology companies such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and Silicon Graphics.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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Summary
In this interview filmed at RubyFringe 2008, Tom Preston-Werner talks about how both Powerset and GitHub use Ruby and Erlang, as well as tools like Fuzed, god, and more.

Bio
Tom Preston-Werner works for Powerset Inc., and is one of the founders of GitHub. He's created various Ruby tools such as the monitoring tool god, and many more.

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Jeff Scudder goes over how to improve the efficiency of your App Engine app.

Check out the docs:
http://code.google.com/appengine

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I’d like to introduce a new Web framework that I launched back in February. It is a full-featured “next generation” framework with a variety of innovations that help make building and deploying Web apps simple. You can read all about the framework at our site, RubyWaves.com. Since launching, we’ve been written up on several blogs (including a mention in Matz’s own, which was kinda cool), including an in-depth interview on InfoQ, and attracted a strong core team. It is currently being used experimentally within YellowPages.com, where I head up our strategic research & development solutions group.

Ultimately, our objective is allow developers to write less code to implement new features, reuse existing code more easily, easily deploy high-performance Ruby Web apps using a variety of architectural models, and do it as much as possible in “the Ruby way”.

This session explore the motivations behind Waves and walk through building a non-trivial Waves application (beyond what is covered in the Web site tutorial) highlighting some of the key features of the framework, such as request lambdas, just-in-time resources, and inheritable configurations. In the process, we will introduce the concept of resource-driven development, which supports the Sun MVC model, but also allows developers to move beyond it and focus on REST-style resource-centric development. We will also touch on some features that are currently edge, including Layers, a Rubyesque mechanism to reuse features across apps, multi-application support, and true threaded request handling running on JRuby.

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This talk will cover some of of the lessons learned implementing the Spiceworks Application including:

• acts_as_modifiable – a Rails plugin that we built that allows you to override and extend class values
• on the fly gem updates – how we keep our rapidly changing application up to date across the world
• performance – discuss tweaks that range from custom caching and design improvements to recompiling the ruby runtime
• avoiding deadlock – the strain of the single threaded nature of Rails and Sqlite3

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While performance and power-efficiency are both important, correctness is perhaps even more important. In other words, if your software is misbehaving, it is little consolation that it is doing so quickly or power-efficiently. Google has already done a very impressive job of addressing one of the reasons why software may misbehave, which is that the underlying hardware may fail. In the Log-Based Architectures (LBA) project, however, we are focusing on perhaps an even more challenging source of misbehavior, which is that the application itself contains bugs, including obscure bugs that only cause problems during security attacks. Software bugs are difficult to recognize, and they are particularly problematic because they may cause every node in the system to fail (unlike hardware failures, which tend to be more isolated).

To help detect and fix software bugs, we have been exploring techniques for accelerating dynamic program monitoring tools, which we call "lifeguards". Lifeguards are typically written today using dynamic binary instrumentation frameworks such as Valgrind or Pin . Due to the overheads of binary instrumentation, lifeguards that require instruction-grain information typically experience 30X-100X slowdowns, and hence it is only practical to use them during explicit debug cycles. Our goal is to reduce these overheads to the point where lifeguards can run continuously on deployed code. To accomplish this, we create a dynamic log of instruction-level events in the monitored application and stream this information to one or more lifeguards running on separate cores on the same chip multiprocessor (CMP).

In our results so far, we have shown that the basic logging approach typically reduces the slowdown by roughly an order of magnitude from roughly 30X to roughly 3X. In a recent ISCA paper, we demonstrated several hardware-based techniques that can eliminate redundancy in the even-driven lifeguards and reduce the slowdown to just 20%. In our ongoing research, we are attempting to achieve similar performance through software-only techniques (by extending dynamic compiler optimization techniques to eliminate redundancy within the lifeguards), and we are extending our support to parallel and concurrent environments. We believe that our techniques are applicable to any event-driven lifeguards that processes streams of events, and are compatible with sampling-based techniques that can further reduce the power and performance impacts of monitoring. This talk will describe the work that we have done so far, as well as our plans for future research.

Google Tech Talks
September 12, 2008

Speaker: Todd Mowry
Todd C. Mowry is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1994. He currently co-leads the Log-Based Architectures project and the Claytronics project. Prof. Mowry recently served as the Director of the Intel Research Pittsburgh lab, and he is currently on sabbatical at Stanford. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.

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If you've ever tried coding up a mobile client application, you've probably noticed that the huge variety of mobile operating systems makes it tough to build rich applications that work on every device. But what if developers could deploy applications directly to mobile browsers rather than develop native applications? Google Gears for Mobile is a mobile browser extension for creating rich web applications for mobile devices. This session will show you how Gears for Mobile can be used to develop offline capability into your mobile web apps and how to create slick and responsive applications by hiding latency issues through controlled data caching and storage between sessions.

Andrei Popescu and Charles Wiles (Google)

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Once an app is out of development and has thousands or millions of users, a developer needs to worry about pushing buggy code in front of users. This talk will walk through some of the facilities that Google App Engine provides for testing code in the production environment before seamlessly pushing it live to your users. Additionally, we'll discuss some tips for optimizing the performance of your app so you can give your users an even better experience.

Ken Ashcraft (Google)

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As Joel Webber says, "The fastest HTTP requests are those which do not, in fact, occur." GWT really takes this principle to heart. It turns out that GWT's compilation process provides the perfect opportunity to smush, pack, tweak, and jimmy the various types of resources needed in an Ajax application. Image bundles can reduce the number of image fetches by an order of magnitude. Style injection can automatically minify your CSS and inline background images as "data:" URLs. The Gadget linker automatically creates a module XML file for your GWT-based Google Gadget, and the Gears linker extension automatically creates a Gears manifest so you easily run your GWT app offline.

Is there any optimization that GWT doesn't include? No, not really. So, come learn how to use these extremely powerful tools to build surpassingly fast Ajax apps.

Bob Vawter (Google)

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Lombardi Blueprint is a browser based business process documentation and diagramming tool written using GWT and Java. It supports simultaneous viewing and editing of process definitions by multiple users in different locations with multi level undo and a rich editing experience including drag and drop, inline editing and, automatic diagram layout. Implementing these features presented several technical challenges.

Damon and Alex will describe two of the most interesting: 1) synchronizing multiple client object models with the server, and 2) providing a highly responsive diagram editing experience.

Creating a complex user interface poses particular performance problems using today's javascript engines over what can typically be performed with a native Java VM. The two main challenges we faced with our process diagram were speed of rendering in the browser and automatically laying out and routing large diagrams. Efficient rendering requires us to use a flyweight pattern to handle large html documents, while layout and routing dynamically switches between client and server execution depending on the time required to layout the diagram.

To support multi user editing and viewing Blueprint must keep client and server object models in sync. Our repository design supports doing this efficiently by only requiring us to transfer the differences between two model states in either direction. This same approach allows us also to support rollback to previously saved versions by having the server compute the set of commands required to move between any two states.

Alex Moffat and Damon Lundin (Lombardi)

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Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results. Stress testing may have a more specific meaning in certain industries.

Author: Jesse Schoch

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Steve's book High Performance Web Sites describes the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. YSlow, the Firebug extension he created, codified those best practices. Now working at Google, Steve discusses the next set of best practices he's discovered, including the impact of iframes and where to place (and where not to place) inline script blocks.

Steve Souders (Google)

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Summary
Picture a system so large it cannot be comprehended. Can such a system be "designed" in any conventional sense? Will machines help design it? Will it help design itself? How will it keep running? Will it be alive? The foundations of computing are about to change. In this talk, Richard P. Gabriel explores why and how.

Bio
Richard P. Gabriel has a PhD in CS from Stanford, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He's been a researcher at Stanford, President and CTO at Lucid, Distinguished Engineer at Sun and is now a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research where he looks into architecture, design, and implementation of extraordinarily large, self-sustaining systems and techniques for building them.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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Summary
In this presentation, recorded at Javapolis, Cameron Purdy shows how to improve application performance & scalability via caching architectures to reduce load on the database tier and & clustered caching to provide transparent fail-over by reliably sharing live data among clustered JVMs.

Bio
Cameron Purdy is the founder and president of Tangosol, Inc, a market leader in delivering in-memory caching and data management solutions to companies building and running mission critical enterprise J2EE applications.

About the conference
Javapolis is the largest Java developers conference in europe. Called 'the Apache of software conferences', it is organized by the Belgian Java Users Group and is run non-profit with a very low entrance fee. Javapolis usually takes place in the 2nd week of December.

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Summary
InfoQ has an exclusive chat with one of the original gurus of Rails deployment: Ezra Zygmuntowicz. We discuss his current venture, EngineYard, and the future of Rails. His book on Rails Deployment is due from Pragmatic Programmers in June 2007.

Bio
Ezra Zygmuntowicz has worked in PHP and hand-blown glass art, and now uses Ruby for web application and system automation programming. His work as the webmaster for the Yakima Herald-Republic newspaper taught him a lot about Rails Deployment architecture and how to scale a Rails app. His book on Rails Deployment is due from Pragmatic Programmers in June 2007.

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Summary
In this presentation @ QCon London, Zed Shaw explains the impact Mongrel's 2500 lines of code have had. He also goes into what makes a project successful (good documentation, make the product is to install and extend, etc) and how companies can get on the good side of open source projects they use.

Bio
Zed A. Shaw's Mongrel Web Server is the favored way for organizations of all kinds to breathe life into their fledgling Ruby on Rails applications. Zed has been developing software for close to 14 years professionally and has worked in such industries as academics, security, government, and companies big and small.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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Kevin Clark is back again and talking about his latest work: Rubinius, grammar parsing from ruby, kqueue, and massive build systems.

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Summary
In this QCon presentation, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels explains how Amazon has become a platform provider, and how an increasing number of diverse businesses are built on the Amazon.com platform. Although Amazon.com's scale makes them seem an extreme case, lessons have been learnt that will be of use to every enterprise looking to provide services to or to consume services of business partners.

Bio
Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry. Werner maintains a weblog at AllThingsDistributed.com.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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