George Georgovassilis writes about information technology architecture
TL;DR: HTTP compression can delay rendering of web resources HTTP permits content to be served with different encodings, some of which can be used to compress [1] the data volume transferred over the network, which has become a frequent suggestion [2] towards optimising websites for performance. It turns out that the deflation phase of the … Continue reading HTTP compression and incremental rendering
Abstract: Unjam CSS is a technique for removing render-blocking CSS from pages over which we have only partial control, such as CMS or portals. The problem: a portal generates HTML pages based on a template. Custom HTML can be inserted at specific place holders, but we can't modify the rest of the page HTML. The … Continue reading Unjam CSS
This post discusses a way to increase a service architecture's scalability by removing any communication paths between services and instead burdening clients with that communication. Bureaucracy in real life is a trade-off between ease of work for the applicant vs. ease of work for officers In "Les 12 travaux d'Astérix" [1], Asterix and Obelix are … Continue reading Scalability through client-driven workflows
Just a little reminder to self: when running Tomcat with Java 8 in an Ubuntu Docker container, Tomcat will take a very long time (minutes!) to start with even the simplest web application. The issue is actually documented (not entirely Docker-related). The solution is to modify JAVA_OPTS to use a different random device: JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom
Flash drives enjoy a reputation for being fast and that certainly goes for high-end models with their elaborate memory controllers and multi-bank layouts. A fundamental "problem" with current flash memory technology is that writing even a single bit of information requires that an entire block of flash memory is reset first [1], which greatly reduces … Continue reading Formatting USB flash drives for write speed
