With the advent of multi-core CPUs concurrency is becoming more important, but is traditional threading the way to go? The problem is that traditional threading is very difficult to get right. I am sure that are some cowboys out there who will respond to that last sentence by saying that “real programmers” don’t have a […]

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Someone recently ran a benchmark comparing Rails to Django and Symfony and the posted the results on the Rails wiki. The gist of the benchmark is that the author created some dynamic content in all three frameworks and then used siege to hammer the server with 50 and then 150 concurrent users. At 50 users […]

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Everyone knows a programmer who is more concerned about microseconds of execution time than whether or not the correct result is returned. The opposite of those programmers are the architects who follow the mantra “Make it correct then make it fast”. These architects seem equally unconcerned about getting the result in a reasonable time as […]

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This past week I ran into an interesting issue with Log4J. We had an appender in our log4j.xml file that used PatternLayout with the following pattern: “[%-5p] %d{DATE} %c {%F:%L} - %m%n”. I was looking to reduce the amount of information being written to the log files as they are getting difficult to read. I […]

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