#performance

How to cut AUR package build times on ArchLinux, plus what the move from Ubuntu to a rolling release actually gets you.

Scaling out with cloud instances or scaling up with bigger machines: what StackOverflow's scale-up architecture says about the trade-off.

Purge, ban and tag-based invalidation in Varnish 3 — why banning a regex does not free memory the way you think, and how surrogate keys turn a hundred invalidations into one.

Parallelising PHP lint with xargs so the linting step stops dominating build time on a large project in Jenkins.

ReactPHP puts an event loop in a language whose entire ecosystem assumes there isn't one. A look at what works, what a single blocking call does to it, and the narrow set of jobs it is actually right for.

Bubble, insertion, merge and quicksort written out in PHP and timed against each other — and against sort(), which beats all of them by two orders of magnitude for a reason worth understanding.

TRIM, scheduler choice, mount options and the writes worth moving off disk, to get both speed and lifespan out of an SSD on Linux.

Serving Google Analytics' JavaScript from your own domain with a local cache, so a third-party request stops holding up page load.

Making Munin usable once you are monitoring more servers than you expected: a cleaner layout and the plugins worth adding.

Why a heavily used MySQL database stays fragmented even after you delete data, and how to optimise tables that are full of VARCHAR columns.