{inercia}

Python on the browser

Alvaro — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:55:43 +0000

A very cool article on how to use Python on the browser. Maybe it is a bit heavyweight thing to do, because your Python code will be interpreted by a Silverlight application that acts as a Python interpreter, but it is ok for people like me who know how to program in Python but hate Javascript…

libevent 2.0

Alvaro — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:06:02 +0000

This is a description of the new features that can be found in libevent 2.x. One of the main reasons for using it would be the inclusion of sendfile() operations (where the OS does all the work when sending large files from disk), and big performance improvements, specially in the HTTP code:

Preliminary results around April 2009 indicated that the rewritten codebase had improved our large-payload HTTP benchmark performance by between 35 and 174 percent. We hope that as we profile and benchmark this code more aggressively, we can find more opportunities for improvement here.

This has been confirmed by some other people but, looking at this recent survey on WSGI servers performance, it also seems there could be some memory leaks in libevent 2.x…

Filesystems for CDNs

Alvaro — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:03:06 +0000

XtreemFS. It seems to have all the neccessary things for developing you own CDN at the OS level with minimum effort. Similar to Coda, but it gives you on-demand file replication (read-only, of course) on WAN environments, POSIX semantics (so you don’t need to modify you application) , stripping and parallel I/O (equals to high performance), etc.

So, what else do you need? Maybe a web server like cherokee or nginx for streaming (with throttling) flv and h264, and you are ready to have your low-cost CDN…

Video codecs

Alvaro — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:14:28 +0000

An interesting article on video codecs licensing and how we are all being out of the law. The conclusion is very simple: Theora is a free standard we can all use for commercial purposes, we know, but just because it is not widely used!. Otherwise, legions of unknown patent holders would sue you right when you release the version 1.0 of your software. And why is it not so popular? Well, just because it is not up to the task… or at least not as good as h264. So we are stuck with h264 for a while…

gevent performance

Alvaro — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:31:56 +0000

I´m using gevent for implementing a basic HTTP stresser and I must say I´m impressed with the performance I can get with this framework. My program launches thousands of HTTP requests (with urllib2) to my server, asking for very long files (>200MBytes), and I´m getting up to 2 Gbit/sec with almost no CPU usage in the client. Really good for a slow language like Python…