What makes performance decrease over time?
In an excellent blog post, Nikita Prokopov shares his thoughts about “our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence,” explaining, among others, that year after year, hardware…
Streaming large uploads to a backend API
When it comes to uploading large files to a Flask application, the subject seems to be well documented. Flask (or rather Werkzeug) has lots of features to stream not only downloads, but also uploads t…
Make your build agents short living
While discussing with a friend of mine what I described in my previous article, it appeared that my approach to launching tests from a build pipeline is not necessarily well known. It seems that I can…
Users matter more than bytes and CPU cycles
There is something completely wrong in developers' nature to be obsessed with performance to the detriment of everything else. It seems even that this compulsive obsession is not something we acqu…
Execution plan caching for stored procedures and parametrized queries
Reading different explanations about execution plan caching by Microsoft SQL Server, I found very confusing the discussion about the benefits of using stored procedures instead of parametrized queries…
Measurement: a two-edged sword
Too often, the practice of measuring things is used in place of basic thinking, and, logically, leads to low customer satisfaction and poor product quality.
The major reason for that is that in most c…
Streaming input and output in Flask
I always found Flask painful to use when it comes to streaming binary data, such as when I need to send a binary file or receive one. The official documentation is very sparse, explaining how to recei…
Most performance questions are wrong
I don't remember any question posted on Programmers.SE related to performance which would be a good, on-topic question.
I remember questions which were completely wrong or simply unanswerable.
It…
Did you know that Ruby is faster than C?
In the past few days, there was on Programmers.SE at least three questions (example) which can be summarized as: “Which programming language is faster, this one or that one?”
This is annoying. I alrea…
Written in stone
On most projects, a huge amount of time is spent hypothesizing about subjects which not only don't matter, but often don't have a definitive answer. I often see programmers arguing about which…
Image formats and why do they matter
See also How does Yahoo's Smush.It work and why doesn't everyone use it?, from which this article is inspired from.
One question any web developer asks himself sooner or later is which format…
Don't use it, it's slow
Recently, I’ve received an e-mail like this from a colleague of mine, the e-mail being sent to a few people in the company:
“FYI, we have removed SQL computed columns used when computing the gauges.…
Pooling and performance: what benchmarks and profiling may reveal
When benchmarking Orseis, I discovered that with repetitive queries, its performance drastically decline. In some conditions, it was more than ten times slower compared to the direct usage of ADO.NET.…