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The Cargo Cult of TCP_NODELAY: When to Use It
I learned a ton writing this post, especially about how HTTP2 works and how its binary format affects network performance. Hopefully you’ll learn something here as well! What is Nagle’s Algorithm My last post kinda exploded on Hacker News while a raging debate on TCP_NODELAY went on. It was wildly interesting to see the two […]
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Golang is evil on shitty networks
This adventure starts with git-lfs. It was a normal day and I added a 500 MB binary asset to my server templates. When I went to push it, I found it interesting that git-lfs was uploading at 50KB per second. Being that I had a bit of free time that I’d much rather be spending […]
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[Solved] A 2-day adventure in networking, Windows, IPv6 and WSL
My servers all are IPv6-only, or they would be if I didn’t use WSL. I’ve always preferred Windows to virtually anything else, but I like the Linux command line better. (I’m not too fond of PowerShell… and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.) So, back to the story. I finally got absolutely tired […]
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Building the fastest PHP router ever
Ok, so the title might be a little bit click-baity since I haven’t compared it to every router in existence. Just nikic’s Fast Route. On my sabbatical last summer, I was messing about with microservices (which I’m convinced are evil, but that is an article for another day). During that, I decided to create a […]
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Exploring the performance of FrankenPHP
If you live in the PHP world, you’ve probably heard of FrankenPHP. As soon as I saw the project, I fell in love with it. I tend to go back and forth between several languages, even mixing them when the problem calls for it. But here’s FrankenPHP, a beautiful mix of Go, C, and PHP. […]
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Wait, a 304 reply can change headers?
This evening I was optimizing some caching things for a web app I’ve been working on when I discovered something obvious when you think about it. Now, this is specific to Chrome-ish browsers and Firefox; I have no idea what will happen in Safari. Imagine the following PHP code: This code sets a random integer […]
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Algorithms in PHP: Deques (circular buffers & linked lists)
In the previous post, I talked about priority queues. But in my explanation of an alternative implementation, I neglected to mention a few things: The alternative implementation isn’t for production; there are edge cases and unhandled errors. The alternative implementation is meant for a short queue, not an infinite one, such as the one you […]
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Algorithms in PHP: Priority Queues (and Heaps)
This is the beginning of a series on implementing various algorithms in idiomatic PHP and their reference implementation (usually based on C++). Today we’re going to be talking about Priority Queues. A priority queue is where each value has an associated “priority” that determines which order things come out of the queue. The best real-life […]
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Stateless-Passwordless Authentication using Cryptography
Say you want to ensure a user has access to a given email address (or phone number) on the device that they are trying to access your service. This is handy in a number of circumstances, but more importantly, can you authenticate the user without using a database? It turns out the answer is yes, […]
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Um, since when is PHP faster than C++?
Last week I was working on porting an encryption scheme to PHP from C++, mostly to embed it in a website and make changes to it specific to my use case; and for fun. Needless to say, I was surprised to see my PHP version was faster than the C++ version. TL;DR: it isn’t faster, […]