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What is CPU cache and how does it impact performance?

Categories

Tags servers app-development programming how-to

Imagine your computer’s CPU as the engine of a powerful sports car, tirelessly driving it towards your destination. The CPU cache, in this case, acts like the high-octane fuel needed to keep the engine revved up, ensuring smooth and efficient operation. By Faraz Khan.

Positioned strategically between the CPU and main memory, the cache is a critical component in enhancing your computer’s speed and responsiveness. Let’s dive deeper into the world of CPU cache and processors cache to unravel its secrets and understand its significance in optimizing your computer’s speed and responsiveness. Further in teh article:

  • What is CPU cache?
  • How does CPU cache work?
  • The three levels of CPU cache
  • How does cache affect CPU performance?
  • How to clear CPU cache?

CPU cache plays a vital role in optimizing the performance of computer systems. Understanding its impact and the different levels of cache (L1, L2, and L3) is essential for making informed decisions when choosing processors. Cache enables faster data access, reduces memory latency, and improves instruction fetching, resulting in enhanced CPU performance.

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From polling to websockets: Improving order tracking user experience

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Tags servers app-development web-development event-driven messaging

Where is my order? Is the app stuck? Even when everything else in an application is polished, the user experience might be far from delightful if the information on the screen rarely updates. Displaying up-to-date and often updating information on an application view inspires confidence in the quality of the product and the prospect of getting what you ordered. By Tero Laitinen.

our backend services push order tracking and group order state updates through the service consumer-events to consumer clients in addition to notifications. As a result, we can refresh client app views frequently and with low latency. Ensuring satisfying user experiences is our top priority, but our engineers also enjoy reduced server loads due to less polling, enabling us to better serve our rapidly growing user base.

Further in the article:

  • Proof of concept: Delivering notifications using Socket.IO
  • WebSocket-based state updates
  • Client implementation considerations

By starting with a polling architecture, we could focus on core business features while offering an excellent order-tracking user experience. When we had fewer active users, clients could poll the state more often without straining the backend. Now we operate at a scale where relying only on polling is impractical. Maintaining user-specific PUB/SUB connections between a Redis instance and the WebSocket servers scales to many users. As an unexpected dividend of this technology choice, upstream services may use Redis transactions to implement message-triggering logic, for example, to skip duplicates. Good read!

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How to upgrade your Flask application using async

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Tags python app-development web-development

Long before Python 3, and ChatGPT, and TikTok, poor developers had to write their web servers using shudders Python 2 native features. This meant no asynchronous operations. The frameworks that arose from this era proliferated and became cornerstones of web development. There might even be a synchronous Python web server showing you this text right now. But things change, and with Python 3’s native support of asynchronous operations came a new standard - Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (ASGI). By vidavolta.io.

The article then explains:

  • First things first - the synchronous approach
  • Asynchronous web servers

Asynchronous web servers are fundamentally different in how they handle requests and concurrency. They will run a main process - essentially a task manager, that schedules requests to be executed. The key distinction here is that tasks will return control to the task manager when they need to wait for asynchronous work - like in the case of an expensive network call.

We explored synchronous and asynchronous Python web servers and showed that for heavily IO/Network bound workloads, the (relatively) newer ASGI compliant web servers can be far more performant than WSGI servers.Interesting read!

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How GitHub Copilot is getting better at understanding your code

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Tags devops app-development machine-learning big-data data-science

With a new Fill-in-the-Middle paradigm, GitHub engineers improved the way GitHub Copilot contextualizes your code. By continuing to develop and test advanced retrieval algorithms, they’re working on making our AI tool even more advanced. By github.blog.

To pull back the curtain, we asked GitHub’s researchers and engineers about the work they’re doing to help GitHub Copilot improve its contextual understanding. Here’s what we discovered:

  • From OpenAI’s Codex model to GitHub Copilot
  • Why context matters
  • How GitHub Copilot understands your code
  • Improving semantic understanding

The GitHub product and R&D teams, including GitHub Next, have been collaborating with Microsoft Azure AI-Platform to continue bringing improvements to GitHub Copilot’s contextual understanding. So much of the work that helps GitHub Copilot contextualize your code happens behind the scenes. Interesting read!

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A brief history of MicroStack

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Tags devops app-development cloud software-architecture

OpenStack is no doubt a wonderful and successful piece of software. It allows you to create your own cloud infrastructure, and thanks to its open-source nature, it’s free to use for everyone. By Andre Ruiz.

But as with many giant software projects, all that power comes with a challenge: it is reasonably complex to install and configure. A number of OpenStack distributions do exist that intend to make engineers’ life a lot easier, but those also tend to be more complex than a non-experienced user would like them to be.

Canonical MicroStack is an open source project that enables you to easily deploy a fully-functional OpenStack environment on your workstation or even a virtual machine (VM) in minutes. Even though it was originally designed with testing and development use cases in mind, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware, it is now heading towards its first stable release. This means that it will soon be suitable for production use cases too. To learn more follow the link to full article. Nice one!

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Why Ethereum is still the home of DeFi

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Tags blockchain cio miscellaneous learning crypto fintech

Ethereum is the 2nd largest blockchain by market cap behind Bitcoin, and thus the largest smart contract blockchain, so it’s no surprise that Ethereum’s blockchain supports the largest portion of assets locked in DeFi protocols, with about $27b of assets locked. By @ultimate.app.

The article then points at few statistics and observations:

  • Ethereum is a model for fair token distribution
  • Ethereum is a model for open-source, community driven development
  • Now energy efficient via Proof of Stake, Ethereum is the most economically secure blockchain
  • The investment case for ETH is linked to the Ethereum blockchain’s usage
  • L2 activity has surpassed L1 activity
  • Challenges remain around scalability, decentralization, MEV

While Ethereum has made significant progress, challenges remain. The historical lack of staking withdrawals catalyzed the growth of liquid staking, where “winner take all” effects have resulted in almost 30% of all staked ETH within the Lido protocol - not an ideal scenario for decentralization. Ethereum’s blockchain is home to the majority of the DeFi market’s TVL, $100b of stablecoins, and produces tens of millions of dollars in transaction fees every month. For more stats and charts follow the link to the full article. Interesting read!

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How to use ChatGPT AI for smart contract development

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Tags blockchain app-development bots miscellaneous learning

ChatGPT and AI have become the most exciting new technologies of the past decade. You’ve likely already seen some of the fascinating use cases of the tool like writing poems, lyrics in the style of renowned musicians, film scripts, college essays, and more. In this blog, you’ll learn how to use ChatGPT to improve your smart contract development. By Clarissa Watson.

In this article you will find information about:

  • Getting Started with ChatGPT
  • Method 1: Ask questions to ChatGPT
  • Method 2: Write smart contract code with ChatGPT
  • Method 3: Audit and test code with ChatGPT
  • Method 4: Practice code with ChatGPT
  • Explore ChatGPT with Infura to improve Dapp development

Authors have only scratched the surface with what can be done with ChatGPT and smart contract coding for dapp development. You can think of the tool as an extremely knowledgeable and helpful mentor who is able to answer almost any question you may have in your web3 journey. How interesting!

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What is the best time to perform regression testing?

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Tags tdd web-development app-development miscellaneous

When does regression occur in a software product? Whenever there is any change in the application code. Application or software development is not complete without adding new features or changing its existing code. By Geosley Andrades.

Regression testing is a form of software testing that checks if any code change or a new feature has introduced any new software regressions. This testing approach can confirm if the product is working as before with the new features and bug fixes.

The content of the article covers:

  • What is regression testing?
  • When to perform regression testing?
    • When a new feature is introduced in the product
    • After fixing a software bug
    • When integrating with an external system
    • Following a major business change
  • How to perform software regression testing

The emergence of QA automation is facilitating application development companies to improve software testing quality. Automation can make regression testing easier to execute. Besides the speed, automated testing can improve product quality. Nice one!

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Revolutionize business websites with Copilot in Power Pages

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Tags big-data cio web-development azure devops bots ai

Today at Microsoft Build, we are thrilled to share new features and capabilities for Microsoft Power Pages. Next-generation AI enhancements via Copilot in Power Pages, now in public preview (in North America only), is revolutionizing how to build and launch data-centric business websites.

This article also explains how to:

  • Create contextual chatbots in Power Pages with generative answers
  • Connect to data anywhere with virtual table and Power Automate integration in Power Pages
  • Introducing developer websites for Power Pages
  • Helping administrators securely control website data

These new Power Pages AI capabilities, low-code innovations, and sophisticated tooling to aid developers will help your business accelerate development, increasing your efficiency and speed of creating websites that scale. The possibilities are unlimited. Just think it, describe it, and Power Pages will help you build it. Good read!

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Using Arm64EC with Windows 11

Categories

Tags miscellaneous app-development azure learning

This article demonstrates how to use Arm64EC in a C++ application. The application you will implement performs the multiplication of two pseudo-randomly generated square matrices. By Dawid Borycki.

With the advent of complex machine learning and artificial intelligence models, you need fast and energy-efficient hardware. For fast, efficient hardware, Arm has introduced an architecture used by most chips in embedded and mobile systems. It has been adopted for laptops, desktops, and servers and enables you to accelerate your applications.

Further in the article:

  • App Porting with Arm64EC
  • How It Works
  • Arm64EC in Action

The Arm64EC ABI enables transparent and direct interoperability with your existing x64 dependencies, meaning you can use x64 and Arm64EC in the same process. This is possible because Arm64EC code is compiled with the same pre-processor architecture definitions as x64 code, and the Arm64EC ABI is compatible with the X64 ABI. Consequently, you can gain performance by speeding up the computation of intense code by employing Arm architecture without porting everything simultaneously to Arm64.

This article described the Arm64EC architecture, then demonstrated how to configure the Windows Dev Kit 2023 for Visual Studio development. It also showed how to use this environment to implement a C++ application and then how to implement it on an Arm64EC device. Finally, it confirmed the performance boost by switching from x64 to Arm64EC on an Arm-powered device. Nice one!

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