Taras’ Blog

In my last blog post I expressed frustation with slowness induced by library IO. Then I went on a mission to measure it. I have been wanting to this for a while, but I figured that only DTrace can get this info without recompiling my kernel. So I tried to build Mozilla under Slowlaris (but [...]

So I’ve been trying to figure out how optimize disk IO startup. I looked into IO caused by libraries and turns out that apps with big libraries are screwed. Here is how I came to this conclusion: Gnomer’s research on startup pointed out that dumb readahead leads to wins in terms file io. So I [...]

I spent the past couple weeks analyzing and improving fastload performance. I’ve long been suspicious of fastload, but only finally got around to investigating it in detail. I think there is some fundamentally ironic rule in software that if you put the word “fast” in the name of a component, it is bound to eventually [...]