PassMark - Slashdot User

Comment Real numbers and graphs (Score 1) 752

by PassMark on Sunday December 20, 2009 @09:16PM (#30508040) Attached to: The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook

We have done the actual benchmarks, and the original post matches our experience.
PHP gives processing times of around 1 second (for a search function) and C++ code via a CGI gaves times of 0.1 sec. A ten times improvement.

Graphs and numbers are here,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html

Further when we switched to FastCGI we saw another 5 fold improvement, after optimising the code for FastCGI.

So I would believe a 50 folder improvement should be possible by going from PHP to FastCGI (and rewriting code to suit a FastCGI)

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:29PM from the 9cm-edited dept.

sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus 205

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @02:40PM from the concealed-carry-in-australian-waters dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"

Comment Zoom Search is another option - But don't crawl (Score 1) 232

by PassMark on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @03:11AM (#29804787) Attached to: What Desktop Search Engine For a Shared Volume?

We are the developers of the Zoom search engine.
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/

We have spent some time recently looking at the problem if indexing large amounts of data, for see,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/faq_large_sites.html

Many people above have recommended using external appliances, or external hardware. This doesn't make sense in our opinion. Using an external indexer that crawls your files means that 1) You are loading up your network, 2) You are limited to network bandwidth speeds (rather than SATA or SCSI data transfer speeds) 3) You have the overhead of the HTTP protocol.

What makes sense is to run the indexer on the server that is hosting the files and index them directly off the disk. Don't spider them, and don't do it across a network. This can save you many days of indexing time.

But with this much data, I don't think there is any really quick solution. Whatever you decide to do is going to take some setup effort.

Submission + - Periodic table gets a new, unnamed element (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by koavf on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @11:11PM

koavf writes: More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of "super-heavy" element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as "ununbi" means "one one two" in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name.

Comment Firefox beat Chrome in real world Javascript app (Score 1) 807

by PassMark on Wednesday September 03, 2008 @11:43PM (#24869247) Attached to: Google Chrome, the Google Browser

As pointed out in this New benchmark Chrome doesn't perform so well when using an independent benchmark. One of the most popular and commonly used test suite is SunSpider. It is worth noting that this is developed by the WebKit team (WebKit being the rendering engine in Safari and now, Google Chrome). So the benchmark being used was created by the developers of the JS engine. So it is hardly surprising that they do well in their own benchmark.

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