Articles - Run Time Issues

Your programs are more reliable and often faster when you code with careful memory techniques. Those advantages come at a low cost, too: the ideas behind the five tips presented below are simple enough to understand on a first reading. Start to practice them today, and you'll soon see pay-offs in the the applications or libraries you write.

"Some investigation revealed that there’s a long standing bug in Redhat Perl that causes *severe* performance degradation on code that uses the bless/overload combo..."

The third and final installment in this series on run-time monitoring of Java applications focuses on strategies and techniques for monitoring the performance and availability of an application's supporting and dependent services. These include the underlying host operating system, the operational database, and messaging infrastructures. The article concludes with a discussion of performance data management issues and data reporting and visualization.

Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. The code was merged today (but is not yet ready to be enabled by default in the nightly builds) and is planned for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, the next incremental update of the open-source web browser.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux®. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed). This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under ... [more]

This guide explains how to integrate eAccelerator into PHP5 and lighttpd on a Debian Etch system. From the eAccelerator project page: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the sp... [more]