Posts in the optimisation category

Why the thread-pool math matters: a busy-wait locks one OS thread per waiting actor. A semaphore lets thousands of sleeping actors share a handful of threads.

Continuing on from S1E1 that highlighted issues around memory access stalls, and optimisation of hot and cold data, the same issue shows up with nested loops — when we traverse a data structure larger than the cache in t

Not all memory is equal. It's a beginner's mistake to think that all memory access takes an equal amount of time. Many managed languages abstract memory layout away so the programmer can focus on functionality, but in do

One of the things you can do to speed up browsing and general internet activity is to create a local DNS cache. A DNS is a Domain Name Server and its purpose is to convert domain names to IP addresses. Every time you typ

Having moved house I have just been connected to broadband. The connection is a decent enough 4mbps but for some reason, especially in the evening, when I went to a website when I was surfing the browser would spend a fe

Following on from my previous article, <a href="2008-06-23=firefox3eastereggsaboutmozilla" target="blank"Firefox 3 Easter Eggs</a, I have discovered that broadband users can get a significant speed increase from Firefox