Scalability
One of the luxuries that I’ve gotten used to at some of the places I’ve worked is being surrounded by people who understand scalability. In my recent job hunt and other between-job activities, I’ve...
View ArticleActor Model Concurrency
All of a sudden, everybody is talking about concurrent programming. The driving factor, of course, is the fact that multi-core processors have moved beyond the server room, into the machines people use...
View ArticleActor Model Example
At the end of my original actor-model post, I suggested that I might post some example code to show how it works. More importantly, I want to show how it avoids some common problems that arise in the...
View ArticleBrevity is Not Power
In the context of responding to a post about C++, I realized that part of what I was addressing was the fairly common attitude that brevity in a programming language was indicative of the language’s...
View ArticleScaling Beyond Caches
Caching is a neat trick. It’s a really really neat trick, using one level of the storage hierarchy to hide or work around slowness in the next, and we wouldn’t be able to do much of what we do without...
View ArticleIt’s Faster Because It’s C
I was recently drawn into another discussion about a claim that project Foo was faster than project Bar because Foo is written in C (or maybe C++) and Bar is written in Java. In my experience, as a...
View ArticleServer Design Revisited
About eight years ago, I wrote a series of posts about server design, which I then combined into one post. That was also a time when debates were raging about multi-threaded vs. event-based programming...
View ArticleThoughts on Fowler’s LMAX Architecture
I have the best readers. One sent me email expressing a hope that I’d write about Martin Fowler’s LMAX Architecture. I’d be glad to. In fact I had already thought of doing so, but the fact that at...
View ArticleThe “Gather, Prepare, Cook, Eat” Design Pattern
This post is actually about an anti-pattern, which I’ll call the “grazing” pattern. Code wanders around, consuming new bits of information here and there, occasionally excreting new bits likewise. This...
View ArticleServer Design in Serbo-Croatian
Ten and a half years ago, I wrote an article on server design. Considering that I probably worked harder on that than on anything I’ve posted since, I’m pleased that it has continued to be one of the...
View Article