Benchmarking Scala Collections
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: January 10 2020
Back in 2016, Li Haoyi put together this nice article titled, Benchmarking Scala Collections.
speed
How to read a binary file with Scala (FileInputStream, BufferedInputStream)
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: December 5 2019
As a brief note today, if you need to read a binary file with Scala, here’s an approach I just tested and used. It uses the Java FileInputStream and BufferedInputStream classes:
When you have Flutter app performance problems, try Profile Mode
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: September 25 2019
Today I learned that for several reasons, Flutter Debug mode may be significantly slower than Production mode. As just one reason, Debug mode is compiled using JIT while Production mode uses AOT. You can read more about the reasons on the Flutter UI Performance page.
A very important note on that page is that if you’re using a real hardware device (as opposed to an emulator), you can run your code in Profile mode like this:
A correct Flutter FutureBuilder example (for SharedPreferences, REST services, and database access)
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: September 28 2019
At the time of this writing (September 19, 2019), there’s a lot of bad information in books and on the internet about how to use a Flutter FutureBuilder. That bad information caused me to waste a lot of time over the last two days. I don’t have time today to explain everything, but in short, here’s a technically correct FutureBuilder example:
Notes on how to use GraalVM profile-guided optimizations
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: September 7 2019
As a brief note today, I found that GraalVM was actually making one of my Scala/Java/JVM applications slower, so with the help of Thomas Wuerthinger at Oracle, I learned a little bit about how to use the GraalVM profile-guided optimizations.
Five good ways (and two bad ways) to read large text files with Scala
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: December 5 2019
I’m working on a small project to parse large Apache access log files, with the file this week weighing in at 9.2 GB and 33,444,922 lines. So I gave myself 90 minutes to try a few different ways to write a simple “line count” program in Scala. (Not my final goal, but something I could use to measure file-reading speed without applying my algorithm.)
Good design: Quantity leads to quality (and iteration speed is vital)
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: July 25 2019
When I saw this tweet this morning:
[DOG MAGICIAN] think of a color, any color ... is it ... gray?
[OTHER DOG] oh my GOD
I knew that I loved the joke, but I didn’t like the presentation. I wanted to put the joke on Facebook, but I know that people like images more than they like text, so I made a second cup of coffee and began putting the text on an image.
GraalVM native executables can run faster than Scala/Java/JVM applications, with much less memory consumption
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: September 7 2019
In two small tests where GraalVM was able to create a native executable, the native executable ran significantly faster than the equivalent Scala/Java code running with the Java 8 JVM, and also reduced RAM consumption by a whopping 98% in a long-running example. On the negative side, GraalVM currently doesn’t seem to work with Swing applications.
Performance is important to acquiring and retaining customers.
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: July 4 2019
I used to use wunderground.com all the time. Then, over time, I noticed that it kept getting slower and slower. Out of frustration I looked around for other good weather websites. Today I use accuweather.com.
On the web and with apps, performance — or lack of performance — is important to acquiring and retaining customers.
Smartphone CPUs are still getting significantly faster
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 25 2019
This article on When to use Web Workers had this good chart that shows that smartphone CPUs aren’t hitting a performance wall in the same way that PC CPUs did in 2005.