Posts tagged Faster
Akamai Says The Internet Is a Nastier, and Faster, Place
Feb 2nd
Akamai has released the results of its latest “State of the Internet” report covering the third quarter of 2011. What is interesting is how nasty the Internet has become, with increasing attack incidents recorded and changing strategies for hackers looking to exploit systems. Our last post on the first quarter results can be found here.
“Akamai has seen a 2000% increase in the number of attack incidents recorded on our platform over the last three years, including several recent high-profile Web-based DDoS attacks conducted by both hacktivist groups and more traditional online criminal elements,” says the report.
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Indonesia replaced Myanmar for the quarter’s top attack source, generating 14% of observed attack traffic. Myanmar dropped off the top ten list entirely, suggesting that either hackers have moved their operations or else shut down there.
More attackers are using telnet port 23 than previously, and fewer of them are using Web ports. Akamai posits that the increase is due to attacks based in Egypt and South Korea.
Not surprisingly, Brazil, Italy, and China all experiencing growth of 25% or more in Internet usage. As before, you can assemble your own charts on their website that compare various statistics. Here is the average connection speed among the top Internet-rich countries such as US, Korea, Sweden and Japan:
And you can see increases even among the Internet-poor countries such as Algeria, Armenia and Azerbijan:
The global average connection speed continued to increase in the third quarter of 2011, climbing 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. Denmark pushed Ireland out of the top 10 countries in terms of broadband connections.
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How Google Wants to Make TCP Faster
Jan 26th
Google has some ideas how to make the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) a little bit faster. Earlier this week, Google’s Yuchung Cheng wrote about some of Google’s research and ways that the "make the web faster" team suggests improving TCP. This includes things like increasing the initial congestion window, reducing the initial timeout for TCP, and using a new algorithm for loss recovery. According to Gooogle, this would decrease network congestion and boost page load speed significantly.
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- Increasing TCP’s initial congestion window would reduce network latency by about 10%, according to Google research. Currently the window is four segments, which is good for transmitting about 4KB of data. Google wants to increase this to 10 segments, or about 15KB.
- Google says that using TCP Fast Open would decrease HTTP transaction network latency by 15% and whole-page load time by 10% (on average) and up to 40% in some cases. This is because fast open would enable data exchange during the TCP initial handshake, which would decrease latency by a full round-trip.
- Google also wants to shorten the initial timeout by two seconds. This would give connections one second to time out, which Google argues is plenty on modern networks.
- The Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP that Google developed is already implemented in Linux, and is proposed by Google as a standard.
Cheng says the company is also working on better recovery on noisy mobile networks and more. The work being done by Google is all open source, says Cheng, and submitted as standards proposals to the IETF.
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Google Web Fonts Get Smaller and Faster
Jan 11th
Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you’re already using Google’s Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing!
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According to Raph Levien, an engineer on the Google Web Fonts team, the new implementation uses Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format. Levien says that Google will automatically update the CSS used so that visitors get the fonts with the new compression scheme automatically.
It’s also worth noting that Monotype Imaging has provided a patent grant for MonoType Express, so that it could be used in open source or proprietary software. Google’s also putting MonoType Express compression into sfntly project as well. This way, anybody using sfntly can make use of the new compression scheme, not just folks using Google’s Web Fonts.
If you haven’t checked out Google Web Fonts yet, now might be a good time to do so. I’d start with News Cycle, a really nice, clean font designed by my friend Nathan Willis.
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Google Chrome: New Version Faster and More Secure
Jan 9th
Google Chrome, which recently released version 17 to beta, now has the ability to prerender webpages on the basis of what site a user is likely to visit. When a user begins to type a URL or search query in the address bar, Chrome predicts what page the user wants and begins to load that [...]
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Better, Faster, Stronger PHP: Facebook Introduces HipHop Virtual Machine
Dec 9th
Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost.
Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they’re taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production.
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We’ve covered HipHop before, but in a nutshell, it is a tool to transform PHP into optimized C++ to help reduce CPU usage compared to using Apache and PHP. HPHPi is used during development, but can be very slow to run PHP.
What is HHVM?
According to Evans, HHVM is a “high-level stack-based virtual machine specifically tailored to PHP that executes HipHop bytecode (HHBC).” Evans says that HHVM is “approximately 1.6X faster for a set of real-world Facebook-specific benchmarks.”
Facebook used HPHPi while developing, and uses the HipHop compiler (HPHPc) to compile binaries to run the Web site. In the long term, Evans says “we predict that hhvm will eventually outperform statically compiled binaries in Facebook’s production environment, in part because we are already sharing enough infrastructure with the static compiler that we will soon be able to leverage static analysis results during tracelet creation.”
However, that’s a bit down the road. HHVM is still in the development stage and Evans says there’s “uncertainty regarding the translator’s behavior when running the entirety of Facebook’s PHP codebase.”
But he says that the “first 90%” is done and “now we’re on to the second 90% as we make it really shine.”
HipHop is an Acquired Taste
Like its namesake, HipHop is not for everybody. It may have some significant drawbacks, depending on how you’re using it. Facebook’s environment is, if not unique, at least very unusual. Former Facebook developer Evan Priestley listed a number of downsides to HipHop on Quora in September. Some of Priestley’s complaints (such as using the HipHop interpreter when developing code) are answered with HHVM. But others, like behavioral differences between HipHop and PHP, are issues that developers and organizations considering HipHop need to be aware of.
It’s generally acknowledged that HipHop is not for all applications. Priestley says that it may not provide any performance benefit if the application is not CPU bound. He also says that deployment and support is more complicated, and that diagnosing problems with HipHop is more complex because “you generally have to rule out application bugs first, then verify there is a PHP vs HPHP behavioral difference.”
However, it seems to be working for Facebook and the new HHVM tool answers at least some complaints about earlier iterations. If you’re running a particularly hefty PHP-driven site, it might work for you too. The project is on GitHub. Evans says that HHVM is “deeply integrated” in the HipHop source code, so it should be there for interested developers to play with already.
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Facebook Credits Update: Faster Payments, Greater International Reach
Nov 18th
On the same day that PayPal announced its peer-to-peer Facebook payments app, it also updated Facebook Credits, the company’s virtual currency for buying goods in games and apps on the site.
Facebook Credits now includes a resolved known pay flow issue, updated payment methods for international markets and an updated transfer policy.
Facebook resolved a known pay flow issue that had significantly slowed payments. This issue dealt with callbacks generated by the Pay Dialog. Instead of receiving a callback “status=settled,” which resulted in some users not getting what they paid for, Facebook told developers to fulfill orders after receiving the callback “status=placed.” This cuts out the middle step so that orders will be fulfilled more quickly. On March 1, 2012, Facebook will eliminate the “status=settled” middle step all together.
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Facebook expanded its payment methods worldwide, adding ELV (Germany), MyCard Mobile (HongKong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan), Visa Electron (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand) and WebBilling Online Bank Transfer (Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland). For the full list of payments methods for purchasing Facebook Credits, go here.
Facebook Credits also debuted a new credits policy that “prohibits routing Credits from one app to another app without prior authorization.” Apps that transfer money to each other will not be permitted.
In October, Facebook began testing Credits on outside websites. Earlier in the month, Facebook Credits became available as a payment option on mobile apps except for those running iOS.
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SEO Services For Better Search Rank To Grow Your Website Traffic Faster – AddPR.com (press release)
Nov 2nd
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How Much Faster is iOS 5 For Mobile Browsing? (Infographic)
Oct 25th
Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system two weeks ago, boasting 25 million installs within the first week.
In addition to over 200 new features, iOS 5 came with the promise of enhanced speed. Just how much faster is it? When it comes to mobile Web browsing, iOS 5 loads pages slightly more than twice as fast as its predecessor, iOS 4.
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This is according to a side-by-side test of 3,000 Web apps performed by New Relic, who provided us with the infographic below. They loaded those sites using Safari 5.1 on iOS 5 and compared the results to what they saw when using Safari 5.0 on iOS 4.
According to these tests, it would appear that iOS 5 is substantially faster than the previous version, and is most likely worth the upgrade for most users. The new OS upgrade is available for either version of the iPad, the iPhone 4 and 3GS (it comes installed on the new 4S) and new iPod Touch devices.
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Run Microsoft Office on Your iPad Faster: Cisco Hard-wires Xen
Oct 13th
In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools, letting admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients – even to tablets like Apple’s iPad – without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?
The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stu-stu-stu-stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art qua-qua-quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop – the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.
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The delivery platform for Citrix’ high-definition streamed services is called HDX. Although its principal use today is for streaming virtual desktops to a variety of client form factors, including tablets, it’s a versatile enough technology to be used in the future for such things as live HD videoconferencing that shares the screen with both TV and PC services. Yesterday, Cisco announced its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), whose sole functions are to accelerate HDX traffic and optimize bandwidth on wide-area networks that use Citrix XenDesktop for their virtual desktop infrastructure.
[Diagram courtesy Cisco]
On both sides of a wide-area network, WAAS forms a kind of tunnel. Although that tunnel manages all traffic, it specifically optimizes HDX traffic. Cisco promises that WAAS will expedite HDX traffic by up to 70% on average, while reducing bandwidth consumption by as much as 60%.
Of course, your next question should be, “Sixty percent over what?” Cisco cited a typical 10-user XenDesktop deployment scenario as requiring close to 1.1 Mbps of bandwidth. Its numbers say WAAS will cut that consumption down to about 550 Kbps. Businesses that use dedicated T1 lines for their WAN connections, and that could previously support only about 12 simultaneous XenApp users, can now potentially support 25.
With respect to Office, which is perhaps the most frequently virtualized application suite in all of XenApp, launch response times (according to Cisco’s numbers) are reduced from 7.5 seconds down to 1.5 seconds.
What this means for branch offices such as banks, financial planners, and franchise auto sales is that they can now feel free to try accessing Excel and PowerPoint through their iPads. Consider how this can improve the customer experience: No longer do salespeople have to leave customers waiting in the lobby while they go look something up on their computer. No longer do they print out the charts or spreadsheet tables so customers can see them. Now an automobile salesperson can take the iPad with him, stay with the customer, walk the entire breadth of the lot, and configure deals through the tablet.
I seem to recall beginning this article with a mention of something called “automated deployment,” but already that sounds so 2009.
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Guess How Long it Takes to Fix Google Maps: It’s Faster Than You Might Think
Oct 6th
Google Maps is an incredible technology. Built by acquired startups and licensed commercial data, it’s refined, repaired and extended by thousands of everyday people around the world using Google’s Map Maker editing service. Just today a big batch of new citizen contributed roads and landmarks went live in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But what about when there’s a mistake? Let’s say that an address or landmark is wrong on Google Maps and someone, somewhere uses Google Map Maker to fix it. How long does it take to show up in Google Maps – and how long does it take to populate out into all the embedded Google Maps around the world that are powered by the Google Maps API, the most popular API in the world. According to the company this week, it now takes as little as fifteen minutes. Even a market leader like Google Maps has to stay on its toes because there’s a whole lot of competition trying to win the hearts of developers who use maps in apps.
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The Google Geo Developers blog announced a number of new changes to the geo API this week including faster response time pushing changes from Map Maker through to the Google Maps API. “For many countries, including the U.S.A., this means that corrections made with MapMaker can reach the Maps API within 15 minutes,” says Thor Mitchell, Product Manager of the Google Maps API.
Impressive. They say that the web is like a living ecosystem. So too it seems are the web’s leading maps of the offline world – from beginning to end, from the user mapping app through all the API powered maps around the web.
Right: An 800 year old map of the Belgian village of aalbeke. Note, this one is not in real time so that giant man-eating fish may not be in the same place in the water anymore.
There’s enough competition in the map data space, even though Google is clearly dominant in the developer community, that near real-time edits just make sense. Developers choose every time they embed a map from options that include Google, Bing, Mapquest, OpenStreetMap and new entrants like ESRI’s lightweight new Canvas Maps and the forthcoming super-cool looking startup CartoDB.
Maps have got to stay fast these days to compete.
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