January 2012
1 post
6 tags
Optimizing your images
Most of the bytes associated with a webpage are images. A site that has a lot of small elements in separate files requires a lot of separate requests. And for small elements, a significant portion of that traffic is overhead.
I have built a Windows application to combine images into a single file and output CSS to use it.
Some solutions in reducing overhead can help. You can use a server that...
December 2011
1 post
Preparing for the first holiday lighting adventure
My wife bought three strands of lights on clearance last year in anticipation of decorating the outside of our house for the first time this year. Big multi-colored C9 bulbs with dangling white icicle strands of T1 bulbs. It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t reach around the roof, turns out they had a total of 10’ lighted feet each, and nobody carried those strands...
October 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Going faster in a slowing world
In a world where CLR and JIT are generating native code for our desktop apps on the fly and horribly inefficient interpreted languages are serving our web content, both server-side and client-side, Intel and AMD folks must think our cheese slipped off our crackers.
The x86 processor is incredibly complex, incrementally loaded with new instructions to solve common problems in fractions of the...
7 tags
How low can you go, strlen?
The final verdict: SSE2 is the best option. It offers performance between 150% and 388% of the CRT strlen function. 32-bit CRT and libc strlen are quite slow and the 64-bit strlens are about twice as fast.
1. What about SSE4.2?
First, SSE4.2 is slower. Though it can run on unaligned memory faster than SSE2 can, it seems searching only for zeros can be done more efficiently with SSE2.
Second,...