Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua – CloudFlare blog
Nginx+Lua is a self-contained web server embedding the scripting language Lua. Powerful applications can be written directly inside Nginx without using cgi, fastcgi, or uwsgi. By adding a little Lua code to an existing Nginx configuration file, it is easy to add small features.
Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao, the largest e-commerce website in Asia. It is based on the popular Nginx HTTP server and has many advanced features. Tengine has been proven very stable and efficient on the top 100 websites, including taobao.com and tmall.com.
High Scalability – Zen and the Art of Scaling – A Koan and Epigram Approach
Russell (AKA Jak Sprats) has been pondering, considering, and implementing distributed databases for many years. In a recent email conversation he shared 44 of the lessons he has learned from developing the infrastructure for high performance / highly scalable systems. Some are well known, some are debatable, and some obviously result from a deep experience that is worth learning from:
Historic Tale Construction Kit
Originally conceived as a Flash application and implemented by two german students, Karnebogen and Jungbluth, the Historic Tale Construction Kit is no more.
To preserve one of the first meme generators on the web, the kit recreated in HTML and JavaScript.
Ackley.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Abstract For research insights and development potential,we should explore computer architectures designed to scale indeï¬nitely. Given physical limits, we argue an indeï¬nitely scalable computer should or must (1)reveal
to programmers its component spatial relationships,(2)
forego unique addresses, and(3) operate asynchronously.
Fast Web Performance Starts with DNS
A web page is an ecosystem where multiple objects contribute to the web page content, and as a result to its slowness or even unavailability. Some of the slowness can be due to poor server performance but at times is due to DNS related issues.
5 Things That Are Toxic to Scalability
On the performance side the picture is a bit different. By leaving SQL query writing to an ORM, you are faced with complex queries that the database cannot optimize well. What’s more ORMs don’t allow easy tweaking of queries, slowing down the tuning process further.
Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture
If working on a significantly large JavaScript application, remember to dedicate sufficient time to planning the underlying architecture that makes the most sense. It’s often more complex than you may initially imagine.
This small tag, that is included in the head of your application will signal to the browser the intention to handle a “share” action for a selection of URI’s (think “share this page”), and will register it in the system so that the user can choose it when a client application wants to provide “share” functionality in their app.
Wikitude revolutionizes the creation of Augmented Reality content with new “ARchitect” platform
The Wikitude ARcitect basically consists of two major parts. First, we have the HTML which is placed on top of the camera view. Typically, HTML will contain data which will not move with the user but remain on the screen, whatever the user is looking at.
Second, the heart of ARchitect is the JavaScript library which ties deeply into the application and allows manipulation of the AR objects on the screen.
Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information
Ignoring the privacy implications for a second, as a website developer, you might like to know if your visitors are logged into GMail; you could use that information to automatically fill the email fields in your forms with “@gmail.com”… Perhaps you might want to make your Facebook “like” buttons more prominent if you can tell your visitor is logged into Facebook at the moment? Here’s how I achieve this.
Ben Strong’s Blog: Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You?
to match Google’s page load times you have to cheat on the tcp slow-start algorithm. It appears that stretching the parameters a little bit is fairly common, but Google and Microsoft push it a lot further than most.
Pragmatic Programming Techniques: Scalable System Design Patterns
A bunch of illustrated design patterns for scalable architectures
Pomegranate, a novel distributed file system built over distributed tabular storage, to manage billions of tiny files and support highly concurrent low latency data access. Pomegranate uses distributed extendible hash to index metadata, log-structured storage format and columnar storage to exploit temporal and spatial locality, and snapshot-able and reconfigurable caching to increase parallelism and tolerant failures.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover
Interesting feedback problem in facebook causing massive outage
Facebook’s Instant Personalization: An Analysis of Fundamental Privacy Flaws « 33 Bits of Entropy
Instant Personalization allows a partner website to automatically learn the identity of a visitor (as well as some data about them) without any explicit user action, provided that the visitor is a logged-in Facebook user. It is probably the most privacy-intrusive change introduced by the company this year, and could lead to a profound change in how the web works and is perceived.
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
JSonduit is a service that can turn practically anything on the web into a JSON feed that any website or mobile app can consume. A JSON conduit, if you will.
Feeds are created from one or more source URLs and a custom transform, written in JavaScript, that can manipulate the data before the feed is served.
JSonduit also provides a hosting service for web widgets so that any site can easily display JSonduit feeds. In fact, the recent/popular lists you see below are widgets served by the JSonduit service; all done in a couple of lines of JavaScript (go ahead, view the page source!).
kanaka’s noVNC at master – GitHub
noVNC is a VNC client implemented using HTML5 technologies, specifically Canvas and WebSocket (supports ‘wss://’ encryption).
For browsers that do not have builtin WebSocket support, the project includes web-socket-js, a WebSocket emulator using Adobe Flash .
In addition, as3crypto has been added to web-socket-js to implement WebSocket SSL/TLS encryption, i.e. the “wss://” URI scheme.