Cherry picking SQL query fields to increase performance

January 29, 2013January 29, 2013 sameer 4 Comments

The first SQL query most people learn is the SELECT statement with a query some thing like the following.

SELECT * FROM users WHERE id > 100

Nothing wrong with the syntax itself; but more often than not, what the user really wants is just a few columns from the table as shown in the PHP code below. Here we are only using three columns from the table. The usual practice of developers is to use the * modifier to get all the columns from the table as it is easier then specifying individual column names. It is quicker to select all columns from a table and worry later which to actually use in the code.
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Using PhantomJS to headlessly analyze web pages

July 4, 2012July 4, 2012 sameer

One of this year’s most interesting open source projects has been PhantomJS – a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. I’ve already used it to automatically scrape data from pages and for testing. In this post we will use PhantomJS along with confess.js to analyze web page performance. confess.js currently has two main functions: to provide simple page performance profiles, and to generate a app cache manifests.
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Benchmarking server performance with http_load

May 2, 2009May 3, 2009 sameer 3 Comments

Recently due to increased traffic on my site the server was taking a while to return pages, many times timing out the request. I was thinking of shifting my hosting with another provider, but before I could do that I first needed to test the load the present server could take. What I needed was a simple load testing tool, http_load being one such.
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