Having powerful computer hardware on your servers is important to your web application running efficiently. It is not the only factor however, and often hardware upgrades are used in lieu of application performance fixes – which is usually the incorrect solution. A well designed application will minimize the bottlenecks, and allow efficient processing on standard hardware. Sometimes it is difficult to identify bottlenecks or other performance problems until after an application has gone live, and sometimes a live site can grow to the point where huge problems crop up.
Microsoft has touted their new Metro Apps as a key feature of Windows 8. Metro Apps have a bit of a mixed reputation. On one hand, they provide some much overdue features to the Windows line. On the other hand, they don’t really live up to the hype, and in many instances they are useful only because of other software shortcomings.
But Microsoft has given one claim to Windows 8 Metro Apps that, until today, I found to be true. (more…)
Windows 8 apps can be very useful, but their reputation and usefulness is mixed.
After a few months of using Windows 8, I find that one of the main reasons Windows 8 Apps are useful is because of shortcomings in other software.
For example, we want to use Windows 8 apps to play streaming music like Pandora, or to look at Facebook. But those are pretty lame reasons to develop and use a whole new App platform. I mean, those are already available in a format called “the web” and accessible using something called a “web browser.” So why do we prefer the apps over the web versions? In these cases, the Apps trump the web-based version simply because of computer resources. Having a browser open just for Pandora can drain battery and hurt performance, and the same applies for many other programs and web services. (more…)
The official word on Windows 8 battery life is that it is improved over Windows 7 battery life.
The first reason for this is that the Windows 8 core uses less RAM than Windows 7.
The second reason is that Windows 8 Metro Apps do not run in the background. Rather than consuming resources when they aren’t in the foreground, they are essentially paused in the background.
While both of those claims appear to be true, the overall claim that Windows 8 battery life is improved may not be completely true, and if in fact battery life is worse on Windows 8, it may also not be Microsoft’s fault. (more…)
Windows 8 battery might be worse than Windows 7 for some users (read more) but regardless of the reason, you’re probably reading this article because you want to improve battery life on your Windows 8 laptop or tablet.
There are a variety of angles you can attack this problem from, but you need to start by considering what is taking up your battery life to begin with:
Most likely culprits: Your LCD Display, old battery
Other likely culprits: Wifi, Bluetooh, Hard drive(s), memory
Most likely culprits: Software that came with your PC, start-up garbage
Other likely culprits: Open programs, system clogged with temporary files
So let’s start at the top, and work through the problems (more…)
Finding analogies for programming is very important for training programmers, for communicating to other programmers, to communication to customers and end-users, and to help a programmer’s understanding of their own code and goals for their code.
One thing to remember about analogies: They always brake down. An analogy is a “comparison” – and all comparisons will fall apart eventually, unless the things being compared are identical. In other words, at some point the comparison falls apart because the two subjects are different. This is okay, because we are just using this “comparison” mechanism for learning and understanding, we are not using this comparison to make the plans for the next space shuttle.
Example: A car needs new wiper blades, brake pads, and tires. And just the same, a web application or other application needs some basic maintenance.
A queue, in our context, is a way of lining up requests, and having a program that processes those. Basically, it’s a way of saying “do this later”. It might still be done immediately, but for a variety of reasons it may not happen immediately. The purpose of the queue may not to be “do it later”, but that will happen regardless. The purpose of a queue can be anything from fixing a performance problem, to preventing performance spikes, to delaying a request a minimum amount of time or a number of other reasons. (more…)
When trying to optimize the performance of your MySQL database, the first thing you try is often the most futile:
Table Optimization.
We put this first because it’s often the first “fix” people arrive at when trying to fix performance problems, but we think it’s almost never the solution, so we want to get that out of the way first. Generally speaking, most Mysql tables are created in a very optimum way. 5-10 years ago that wasn’t necessarily the case, however these days most problems are caused at the application-level or table-desgin-level (aka. Improper use of tables or improper table structure). It might be worthwhile to skip this article, but it’s a good idea to keep Table Optimization in mind, just don’t assume that’s going to be some magical fix. (more…)
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