performance

I’ve been reading a lot about search lately: kNN, BM25, RRF and related ideas, both within Elasticsearch and in isolation. With the advent of LLMs, especially open-weight models, plus modern hardware, it feels like a good time to approach some of this in a pragmatic way. On the blog I'm already using a form of BM25 via …

Lately I've started to put my turntable back into working order. It's been disconnected from my main audio chain for about five years. The TT is a Rega RP3 with a bog-standard Rega Carbon cartridge. Why now one might ask? It wasn't my top priority and streaming Spotify to the WiiM Mini then via a DAC directly into my NAD …

I love iTerm2, but it can be sluggish sometimes on my old late 2016 MacBook Pro. Plus, many of its features I never use. I had tried Alacritty before, but making it look and act like iTerm2 was a no-go. This time, I tried Kitty, and within two hours of work, it looked and behaved just like my iTerm2 configuration. This …

I'm not sure why RVM is still my default Ruby version manager, but the issue at hand should be reproducible on rbenv too. Historical note: this article reflects a Vim 8.0, JRuby, RVM, and macOS system Ruby setup from 2017; versions and defaults differ on current macOS systems. Let's add a bit of context to this: we have …

This article reflects the 2016-era Rails asset pipeline—Ruby Sass, libsass, Compass, therubyracer, and Node.js 6—and is not current Rails asset guidance. We all know that for a rather large Rails app with a substantial front end, the asset pre-compilation and more importantly - development mode changes are far from …

Great news everyone! Ruby 2.2 preview 1 has been released ! I'm really curious about the Incremental GC and Symbol GC so let's run some quick Rails benchmarks on a normal Rails API app. Archive note (2014): Ruby 2.2.0-preview1 was prerelease software and must not be used now. Ruby 2.2 reached end of life on 31 March 2018; …

After working with Rails for some time, you start nitpicking about how to improve it. This is the first in a series of articles on how to improve (even marginally) Rails's performance. Archive note (2014): This is Rails 4.1-era advice. Do not copy these dependencies, native extensions, or global monkey patches into a …

Ruby 2.1 was released this Christmas, great news everyone! It sports a better GC (RGenGC — generational GC), hierarchical method caching, some small syntax changes and non-experimental refinements. All in all one can expect 5% to 15% performance increase which is quite awesome. Archive note (2014): Rubinius 2.2.3, JRuby …

As the host OS I use Windows 8 (just upgraded to 8.1), Well, why, one might ask? It is rather simple: Steam and after some dreadful searching and configuring tools I managed to install the basics for writing and deploying code: Vim, Git, PuTTy and a decent console replacement like Console2 [0]. Of course those aren't …

Anyone who has written a little PHP knows what the flush() family of functions do. The ideal usage scenario for using chunked transfer[0] is when we have something costly to render e.g. the first three most recent articles on a blog. Why, one might ask? Why stream It is rather simple: in a normal Rails render, the server …

On UNIX-like operating systems (e.g. Linux) there's the concept of process forking via the fork() system call. When one calls fork from a parent-process it will spawn a new child-process - that is a copy of its parent, then both processes return from fork. The child-process has an exact copy of the parent's memory in a …

Historical Windows/Firefox optimization (2010)—do not move a current browser profile using these instructions. RAM disks are volatile, so data disappears on shutdown or a crash. Moving the wrong profile path can lose history, sessions, cookies, or other user data. Back up the profile and treat this only as a dated account …