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Friday, February 29. 2008

Firefox 2 and 3 on Ubuntu - Night and day

I've been running Firefox 2 with Gutsy since it's release, and using it daily I've only been bothered by a handful of quirks.

1) First and foremost, Flash. Now, the system I do my day to day stuff on isn't exactly a powerhouse - A 3.2 GHz Celeron with 2GB of RAM - but (for me) more than enough. Nonetheless, a single instance of Flash can wreak havoc on my little celery, instantly pegging the CPU to 100% and bloating Firefox up like a balloon. I've tried Gnash as well, without much luck.

2) Occasionally sites with heavy JavaScript will do the same thing, grinding Firefox to a halt with one click. There's not many sites that do it, but a few specific cases perform a lot worse than others.

3) And of course, the glaring memory leaks. Even with zero plugins, opening a few tabs and leaving them open all night would leave me with a 400MB instance of Firefox running. Not good.

Finally fed up with the performance in Firefox 2, I installed the latest beta last night and...

I'm beyond impressed. The difference is like night and day. It opens quicker, and feels much more responsive (even after being left open all night.) Flash no longer constantly eats away at my CPU and RAM and pages don't hang up while loading. Heavy JavaScript and Ajax issues are completely alleviated. And best of all, Firefox's memory usage hasn't gone over 100MB at all - even with 25 tabs open.

So if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy and still haven't checked out Firefox 3, you're in for a real treat.

Thursday, February 28. 2008

Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations

I've been seeing a lot of articles popping up lately about PHP Optimizations, particularly within the code (rather than the configuration, server, caching, etc) that I have some nitpicks with.

My position remains the same: Unless your code is running incredibly slow, you've found every single bug you can possibly find without having nightmares about unit tests, or an optimization that makes more than a 10% improvement in speed (factoring in your margin of error,) don't bother. That said, let's down to brass tacks.
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Tuesday, February 12. 2008

(Almost) Spring Cleaning

I have a bad habit. I love to browse, I have tons of RSS feeds and sites that I check multiple times daily. But that's not my bad habit - invariably during my browsing, I find things I'd like to give mention to, or sometimes try, but with work it never seems to happen. So I've decided to do a short little 'spring cleaning' list to clean up some of the clutter.
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How to install PHP-GTK in Ubuntu 7.10

Just as described on their site,

"PHP-GTK is an extension for the PHP programming language that implements language bindings for GTK+. It provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions and greatly simplifies writing client-side cross-platform GUI applications."

Basically, it will allow you to use almost everything in the GTK+ API with PHP. If you don't already know what GTK+ is, GTK+ is an API for creating a graphical user interface, which also happens to be cross platform (Linux, Windows, and Mac.) Today we're going to cover installing PHP-GTK in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).
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