How to Zoom This Close Into Google Maps

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/how-to-zoom-this-close-into-google-maps/

It is almost impossible to imagine doing day-trips or traveling to a new place without checking it out on Google Maps. Unfortunately, it restricts to zoom in after a certain level. However, there is…

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How To Create An Innovative Web Design Agency Website in 5 Steps

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/G7CLXu9AnnI/how-to-create-an-innovative-web-design-agency-website-in-5-steps

If you want your business to be prosperous and popular among customers, it’s indispensable to create a website for it. The worldwide web is the first place to which people refer in search of new knowledge, inspiration, and resources that will get specific types of services done in the pro way. Are you a freelance […]

The post How To Create An Innovative Web Design Agency Website in 5 Steps appeared first on designrfix.com.

Microsoft to Buy GitHub; Controversy Scheduled for This Week

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/06/microsoft-to-buy-github-controversy-scheduled-for-this-week/

So yeah, what the title said. Microsoft is buying GitHub for 7.5 BILLION with a “B” US dollars. This is officially this week’s Big DealTM, and everyone’s going to be talking about it. It would not be quite accurate to say that GitHub powers software development as a whole, but it powers a lot of it. GitHub’s friendliness to — and free repositories for — open source software have made it nigh on indispensable for many developers around the world.

So now some people are freaking out. People unfamiliar with tech history or the open source world might wonder why. After all, companies change hands all the time. Sometimes that works out for consumers, and sometimes it doesn’t. I personally think it will work out, but I can understand why some people are angry.

GitHub’s friendliness to…open source software have made it nigh on indispensable for many developers

You see, once upon a time, Microsoft was the de facto bad guy of the tech world, and many people still see them that way. From the very beginning, MS embraced some pretty predatory business practices that put them in bad standing with users. Even after the famous antitrust case that broke their impending monopoly on web browsers (yeah, that almost happened), Microsoft has a record of buying good products and then killing them at a rate that rivals Electronic Arts.

What’s more, the Linux and open source community in particular got burned over the years, as Microsoft made a habit of using their advertising budget to spread unsubstantiated claims about Linux, other enterprise-focused operating systems, and open source data security options. People are still sore about that.

products Microsoft hasn’t killed have often ended up feeling rather lackluster

The products Microsoft hasn’t killed have often ended up feeling rather lackluster. Think of Skype, for example.

But I don’t think all is lost. No, Microsoft didn’t suddenly have a collective change of heart, and turn into do-gooders. I think they’ve just realized that ticking off everyone who isn’t them is a poor long-term business strategy. We live in a world where consumers increasingly demand that corporations at least pretend to be good guys, and so Microsoft seems to have changed their modus operandi, to some extent.

They bought LinkedIn for over 20 billion USD, and have let it run more or less as it did before. They released Visual Studio Code—one of the best code editors for Windows that we’ve had in a while—and it’s even open source.

Most telling, they killed Codeplex, their onetime competitor to GitHub, and started putting a lot of their own open source code on the latter platform. All of these actions directly contradict the old patterns Microsoft used to follow.

If they care at all about the goodwill they have earned themselves in the past few years, it would be best to let GitHub be GitHub. If they continue to follow this new pattern, they probably will. Indeed, in Microsoft’s own post on the subject, they state that they intend to let GitHub operate independently.

Acquisition will empower developers, accelerate GitHub’s growth and advance Microsoft services with new audiences

So do we believe them? Why buy GitHub at all, if they’re not going to monetize the hell out of it? Well they will, just not in the way everybody seems to fear. Microsoft doesn’t make most of their money from Windows by selling it to individual users. They do it by selling it to enterprise-level customers, and supporting it. The same goes for Microsoft Office Subscriptions. The indications seem to be pointing in the same direction for GitHub.

Microsoft will most likely develop and sell enterprise-specific tools and services around GitHub to entice their biggest customers onto the platform. They don’t want your money, they want that corporation money. I strongly suspect that for most individual developers and open source projects, the GitHub experience will remain unchanged.

So the average dev could probably look at this sale as a positive change, or at least a neutral one. Failing that, there’s always Gitlab or Bitbucket.

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Keeping Node.js Fast: Tools, Techniques, And Tips For Making High-Performance Node.js Servers

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/06/nodejs-tools-techniques-performance-servers/

Keeping Node.js Fast: Tools, Techniques, And Tips For Making High-Performance Node.js Servers

Keeping Node.js Fast: Tools, Techniques, And Tips For Making High-Performance Node.js Servers

David Mark Clements

2018-06-07T13:45:51+02:00
2018-06-07T12:12:00+00:00

If you’ve been building anything with Node.js for long enough, then you’ve no doubt experienced the pain of unexpected speed issues. JavaScript is an evented, asynchronous language. That can make reasoning about performance tricky, as will become apparent. The surging popularity of Node.js has exposed the need for tooling, techniques and thinking suited to the constraints of server-side JavaScript.

When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js. So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose? Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

Tools

Node is a very versatile platform, but one of the predominant applications is creating networked processes. We’re going to focus on profiling the most common of these: HTTP web servers.

We’ll need a tool that can blast a server with lots of requests while measuring the performance. For example, we can use AutoCannon:

npm install -g autocannon

Other good HTTP benchmarking tools include Apache Bench (ab) and wrk2, but AutoCannon is written in Node, provides similar (or sometimes greater) load pressure, and is very easy to install on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Nope, we can’t do any magic tricks, but we have articles, books and webinars featuring techniques we all can use to improve our work. Smashing Members get a seasoned selection of magic front-end tricks — e.g. live designing sessions and perf audits, too. Just sayin’! 😉

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After we’ve established a baseline performance measurement, if we decide our process could be faster we’ll need some way to diagnose problems with the process. A great tool for diagnosing various performance issues is Node Clinic, which can also be installed with npm:

npm –install -g clinic

This actually installs a suite of tools. We’ll be using Clinic Doctor and Clinic Flame (a wrapper around 0x) as we go.

Note: For this hands-on example we’ll need Node 8.11.2 or higher.

The Code

Our example case is a simple REST server with a single resource: a large JSON payload exposed as a GET route at /seed/v1. The server is an app folder which consists of a package.json file (depending on restify 7.1.0), an index.js file and a util.js file.

The index.js file for our server looks like so:

‘use strict’

const restify = require(‘restify’)
const { etagger, timestamp, fetchContent } = require(‘./util’)()
const server = restify.createServer()

server.use(etagger().bind(server))

server.get(‘/seed/v1’, function (req, res, next) {
fetchContent(req.url, (err, content) => {
if (err) return next(err)
res.send({data: content, url: req.url, ts: timestamp()})
next()
})
})

server.listen(3000)

This server is representative of the common case of serving client-cached dynamic content. This is achieved with the etagger middleware, which calculates an ETag header for the latest state of the content.

The util.js file provides implementation pieces that would commonly be used in such a scenario, a function to fetch the relevant content from a backend, the etag middleware and a timestamp function that supplies timestamps on a minute-by-minute basis:

‘use strict’

require(‘events’).defaultMaxListeners = Infinity
const crypto = require(‘crypto’)

module.exports = () => {
const content = crypto.rng(5000).toString(‘hex’)
const ONE_MINUTE = 60000
var last = Date.now()

function timestamp () {
var now = Date.now()
if (now — last >= ONE_MINUTE) last = now
return last
}

function etagger () {
var cache = {}
var afterEventAttached = false
function attachAfterEvent (server) {
if (attachAfterEvent === true) return
afterEventAttached = true
server.on(‘after’, (req, res) => {
if (res.statusCode !== 200) return
if (!res._body) return
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
const etag = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(JSON.stringify(res._body))
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (cache[key] !== etag) cache[key] = etag
})
}
return function (req, res, next) {
attachAfterEvent(this)
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (key in cache) res.set(‘Etag’, cache[key])
res.set(‘Cache-Control’, ‘public, max-age=120’)
next()
}
}

function fetchContent (url, cb) {
setImmediate(() => {
if (url !== ‘/seed/v1’) cb(Object.assign(Error(‘Not Found’), {statusCode: 404}))
else cb(null, content)
})
}

return { timestamp, etagger, fetchContent }

}

By no means take this code as an example of best practices! There are multiple code smells in this file, but we’ll locate them as we measure and profile the application.

To get the full source for our starting point, the slow server can be found over here.

Profiling

In order to profile, we need two terminals, one for starting the application, and the other for load testing it.

In one terminal, within the app, folder we can run:

node index.js

In another terminal we can profile it like so:

autocannon -c100 localhost:3000/seed/v1

This will open 100 concurrent connections and bombard the server with requests for ten seconds.

The results should be something similar to the following (Running 10s test @ http://localhost:3000/seed/v1 — 100 connections):

Stat
Avg
Stdev
Max

Latency (ms)
3086.81
1725.2
5554

Req/Sec
23.1
19.18
65

Bytes/Sec
237.98 kB
197.7 kB
688.13 kB

231 requests in 10s, 2.4 MB read

Results will vary depending on the machine. However, considering that a “Hello World” Node.js server is easily capable of thirty thousand requests per second on that machine that produced these results, 23 requests per second with an average latency exceeding 3 seconds is dismal.

Diagnosing

Discovering The Problem Area

We can diagnose the application with a single command, thanks to Clinic Doctor’s –on-port command. Within the app folder we run:

clinic doctor –on-port=’autocannon -c100 localhost:$PORT/seed/v1’ — node index.js

This will create an HTML file that will automatically open in our browser when profiling is complete.

The results should look something like the following:

Clinic Doctor has detected an Event Loop issue

Clinic Doctor results

The Doctor is telling us that we have probably had an Event Loop issue.

Along with the message near the top of the UI, we can also see that the Event Loop chart is red, and shows a constantly increasing delay. Before we dig deeper into what this means, let’s first understand the effect the diagnosed issue is having on the other metrics.

We can see the CPU is consistently at or above 100% as the process works hard to process queued requests. Node’s JavaScript engine (V8) actually uses two CPU cores. One for the Event Loop and the other for Garbage Collection. When we see the CPU spiking up to 120% in some cases, the process is collecting objects related to handled requests.

We see this correlated in the Memory graph. The solid line in the Memory chart is the Heap Used metric. Any time there’s a spike in CPU we see a fall in the Heap Used line, showing that memory is being deallocated.

Active Handles are unaffected by the Event Loop delay. An active handle is an object that represents either I/O (such as a socket or file handle) or a timer (such as a setInterval). We instructed AutoCannon to open 100 connections (-c100). Active handles stay a consistent count of 103. The other three are handles for STDOUT, STDERR, and the handle for the server itself.

If we click the Recommendations panel at the bottom of the screen, we should see something like the following:

Clinic Doctor recommendations panel opened

Viewing issue specific recommendations

Short-Term Mitigation

Root cause analysis of serious performance issues can take time. In the case of a live deployed project, it’s worth adding overload protection to servers or services. The idea of overload protection is to monitor event loop delay (among other things), and respond with “503 Service Unavailable” if a threshold is passed. This allows a load balancer to fail over to other instances, or in the worst case means users will have to refresh. The overload-protection module can provide this with minimum overhead for Express, Koa, and Restify. The Hapi framework has a load configuration setting which provides the same protection.

Understanding The Problem Area

As the short explanation in Clinic Doctor explains, if the Event Loop is delayed to the level that we’re observing it’s very likely that one or more functions are “blocking” the Event Loop.

It’s especially important with Node.js to recognize this primary JavaScript characteristic: asynchronous events cannot occur until currently executing code has completed.

This is why a setTimeout cannot be precise.

For instance, try running the following in a browser’s DevTools or the Node REPL:

console.time(‘timeout’)
setTimeout(console.timeEnd, 100, ‘timeout’)
let n = 1e7
while (n–) Math.random()

The resulting time measurement will never be 100ms. It will likely be in the range of 150ms to 250ms. The setTimeout scheduled an asynchronous operation (console.timeEnd), but the currently executing code has not yet complete; there are two more lines. The currently executing code is known as the current “tick.” For the tick to complete, Math.random has to be called ten million times. If this takes 100ms, then the total time before the timeout resolves will be 200ms (plus however long it takes the setTimeout function to actually queue the timeout beforehand, usually a couple of milliseconds).

In a server-side context, if an operation in the current tick is taking a long time to complete requests cannot be handled, and data fetching cannot occur because asynchronous code will not be executed until the current tick has completed. This means that computationally expensive code will slow down all interactions with the server. So it’s recommended to split out resource intense work into separate processes and call them from the main server, this will avoid cases where on rarely used but expensive route slows down the performance of other frequently used but inexpensive routes.

The example server has some code that is blocking the Event Loop, so the next step is to locate that code.

Analyzing

One way to quickly identify poorly performing code is to create and analyze a flame graph. A flame graph represents function calls as blocks sitting on top of each other — not over time but in aggregate. The reason it’s called a ‘flame graph’ is because it typically uses an orange to red color scheme, where the redder a block is the “hotter” a function is, meaning, the more it’s likely to be blocking the event loop. Capturing data for a flame graph is conducted through sampling the CPU — meaning that a snapshot of the function that is currently being executed and it’s stack is taken. The heat is determined by the percentage of time during profiling that a given function is at the top of the stack (e.g. the function currently being executed) for each sample. If it’s not the last function to ever be called within that stack, then it’s likely to be blocking the event loop.

Let’s use clinic flame to generate a flame graph of the example application:

clinic flame –on-port=’autocannon -c100 localhost:$PORT/seed/v1’ — node index.js

The result should open in our browser with something like the following:

Clinic’s flame graph shows that server.on is the bottleneck

Clinic’s flame graph visualization

The width of a block represents how much time it spent on CPU overall. Three main stacks can be observed taking up the most time, all of them highlighting server.on as the hottest function. In truth, all three stacks are the same. They diverge because during profiling optimized and unoptimized functions are treated as separate call frames. Functions prefixed with a * are optimized by the JavaScript engine, and those prefixed with a ~ are unoptimized. If the optimized state isn’t important to us, we can simplify the graph further by pressing the Merge button. This should lead to view similar to the following:

Merged flame graph

Merging the flame graph

From the outset, we can infer that the offending code is in the util.js file of the application code.

The slow function is also an event handler: the functions leading up to the function are part of the core events module, and server.on is a fallback name for an anonymous function provided as an event handling function. We can also see that this code isn’t in the same tick as code that actually handles the request. If there were functions in the core, http, net, and stream would be in the stack.

Such core functions can be found by expanding other, much smaller, parts of the flame graph. For instance, try using the search input on the top right of the UI to search for send (the name of both restify and http internal methods). It should be on the right of the graph (functions are alphabetically sorted):

Flame graph has two small blocks highlighted which represent HTTP processing function

Searching the flame graph for HTTP processing functions

Notice how comparatively small all the actual HTTP handling blocks are.

We can click one of the blocks highlighted in cyan which will expand to show functions like writeHead and write in the http_outgoing.js file (part of Node core http library):

Flame graph has zoomed into a different view showing HTTP related stacks

Expanding the flame graph into HTTP relevant stacks

We can click all stacks to return to the main view.

The key point here is that even though the server.on function isn’t in the same tick as the actual request handling code, it’s still affecting the overall server performance by delaying the execution of otherwise performant code.

Debugging

We know from the flame graph that the problematic function is the event handler passed to server.on in the util.js file.

Let’s take a look:

server.on(‘after’, (req, res) => {
if (res.statusCode !== 200) return
if (!res._body) return
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
const etag = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(JSON.stringify(res._body))
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (cache[key] !== etag) cache[key] = etag
})

It’s well known that cryptography tends to be expensive, as does serialization (JSON.stringify) but why don’t they appear in the flame graph? These operations are in the captured samples, but they’re hidden behind the cpp filter. If we press the cpp button we should see something like the following:

Additional blocks related to C++ have been revealed in the flame graph (main view)

Revealing serialization and cryptography C++ frames

The internal V8 instructions relating to both serialization and cryptography are now shown as the hottest stacks and as taking up most of the time. The JSON.stringify method directly calls C++ code; this is why we don’t see a JavaScript function. In the cryptography case, functions like createHash and update are in the data, but they are either inlined (which means they disappear in the merged view) or too small to render.

Once we start to reason about the code in the etagger function it can quickly become apparent that it’s poorly designed. Why are we taking the server instance from the function context? There’s a lot of hashing going on, is all of that necessary? There’s also no If-None-Match header support in the implementation which would mitigate some of the load in some real-world scenarios because clients would only make a head request to determine freshness.

Let’s ignore all of these points for the moment and validate the finding that the actual work being performed in server.on is indeed the bottleneck. This can be achieved by setting the server.on code to an empty function and generating a new flamegraph.

Alter the etagger function to the following:

function etagger () {
var cache = {}
var afterEventAttached = false
function attachAfterEvent (server) {
if (attachAfterEvent === true) return
afterEventAttached = true
server.on(‘after’, (req, res) => {})
}
return function (req, res, next) {
attachAfterEvent(this)
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (key in cache) res.set(‘Etag’, cache[key])
res.set(‘Cache-Control’, ‘public, max-age=120’)
next()
}
}

The event listener function passed to server.on is now a no-op.

Let’s run clinic flame again:

clinic flame –on-port=’autocannon -c100 localhost:$PORT/seed/v1′ — node index.js

This should produce a flame graph similar to the following:

Flame graph shows that Node.js event system stacks are still the bottleneck

Flame graph of the server when server.on is an empty function

This looks better, and we should have noticed an increase in request per second. But why is the event emitting code so hot? We would expect at this point for the HTTP processing code to take up the majority of CPU time, there’s nothing executing at all in the server.on event.

This type of bottleneck is caused by a function being executed more than it should be.

The following suspicious code at the top of util.js may be a clue:

require(‘events’).defaultMaxListeners = Infinity

Let’s remove this line and start our process with the –trace-warnings flag:

node –trace-warnings index.js

If we profile with AutoCannon in another terminal, like so:

autocannon -c100 localhost:3000/seed/v1

Our process will output something similar to:

(node:96371) MaxListenersExceededWarning: Possible EventEmitter memory leak detected. 11 after listeners added. Use emitter.setMaxListeners() to increase limit
at _addListener (events.js:280:19)
at Server.addListener (events.js:297:10)
at attachAfterEvent
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/util.js:22:14)
at Server.
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/util.js:25:7)
at call
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/chain.js:164:9)
at next
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/chain.js:120:9)
at Chain.run
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/chain.js:123:5)
at Server._runUse
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/server.js:976:19)
at Server._runRoute
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/server.js:918:10)
at Server._afterPre
(/Users/davidclements/z/nearForm/keeping-node-fast/slow/node_modules/restify/lib/server.js:888:10)

Node is telling us that lots of events are being attached to the server object. This is strange because there’s a boolean that checks if the event has been attached and then returns early essentially making attachAfterEvent a no-op after the first event is attached.

Let’s take a look at the attachAfterEvent function:

var afterEventAttached = false
function attachAfterEvent (server) {
if (attachAfterEvent === true) return
afterEventAttached = true
server.on(‘after’, (req, res) => {})
}

The conditional check is wrong! It checks whether attachAfterEvent is true instead of afterEventAttached. This means a new event is being attached to the server instance on every request, and then all prior attached events are being fired after each request. Whoops!

Optimizing

Now that we’ve discovered the problem areas, let’s see if we can make the server faster.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Let’s put the server.on listener code back (instead of an empty function) and use the correct boolean name in the conditional check. Our etagger function looks as follows:

function etagger () {
var cache = {}
var afterEventAttached = false
function attachAfterEvent (server) {
if (afterEventAttached === true) return
afterEventAttached = true
server.on(‘after’, (req, res) => {
if (res.statusCode !== 200) return
if (!res._body) return
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
const etag = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(JSON.stringify(res._body))
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (cache[key] !== etag) cache[key] = etag
})
}
return function (req, res, next) {
attachAfterEvent(this)
const key = crypto.createHash(‘sha512’)
.update(req.url)
.digest()
.toString(‘hex’)
if (key in cache) res.set(‘Etag’, cache[key])
res.set(‘Cache-Control’, ‘public, max-age=120’)
next()
}
}

Now we check our fix by profiling again. Start the server in one terminal:

node index.js

Then profile with AutoCannon:

autocannon -c100 localhost:3000/seed/v1

We should see results somewhere in the range of a 200 times improvement (Running 10s test @ http://localhost:3000/seed/v1 — 100 connections):

Stat
Avg
Stdev
Max

Latency (ms)
19.47
4.29
103

Req/Sec
5011.11
506.2
5487

Bytes/Sec
51.8 MB
5.45 MB
58.72 MB

50k requests in 10s, 519.64 MB read

It’s important to balance potential server cost reductions with development costs. We need to define, in our own situational contexts, how far we need to go in optimizing a project. Otherwise, it can be all too easy to put 80% of the effort into 20% of the speed enhancements. Do the constraints of the project justify this?

In some scenarios, it could be appropriate to achieve a 200 times improvement with a low hanging fruit and call it a day. In others, we may want to make our implementation as fast as it can possibly be. It really depends on project priorities.

One way to control resource spend is to set a goal. For instance, 10 times improvement, or 4000 requests per second. Basing this on business needs makes the most sense. For instance, if server costs are 100% over budget, we can set a goal of 2x improvement.

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Taking It Further

If we produce a new flame graph of our server, we should see something similar to the following:

Flame graph still shows server.on as the bottleneck, but a smaller bottleneck

Flame graph after the performance bug fix has been made

The event listener is still the bottleneck, it’s still taking up one-third of CPU time during profiling (the width is about one third the whole graph).

What additional gains can be made, and are the changes (along with their associated disruption) worth making?

With an optimized implementation, which is nonetheless slightly more constrained, the following performance characteristics can be achieved (Running 10s test @ http://localhost:3000/seed/v1 — 10 connections):

Stat
Avg
Stdev
Max

Latency (ms)
0.64
0.86
17

Req/Sec
8330.91
757.63
8991

Bytes/Sec
84.17 MB
7.64 MB
92.27 MB

92k requests in 11s, 937.22 MB read

While a 1.6x improvement is significant, it arguable depends on the situation whether the effort, changes, and code disruption necessary to create this improvement are justified. Especially when compared to the 200x improvement on the original implementation with a single bug fix.

To achieve this improvement, the same iterative technique of profile, generate flamegraph, analyze, debug, and optimize was used to arrive at the final optimized server, the code for which can be found here.

The final changes to reach 8000 req/s were:

Don’t build objects and then serialize, build a string of JSON directly;
Use something unique about the content to define it’s Etag, rather than creating a hash;
Don’t hash the URL, use it directly as the key.

These changes are slightly more involved, a little more disruptive to the code base, and leave the etagger middleware a little less flexible because it puts the burden on the route to provide the Etag value. But it achieves an extra 3000 requests per second on the profiling machine.

Let’s take a look at a flame graph for these final improvements:

Flame graph shows that internal code related to the net module is now the bottleneck

Healthy flame graph after all performance improvements

The hottest part of the flame graph is part of Node core, in the net module. This is ideal.

Preventing Performance Problems

To round off, here are some suggestions on ways to prevent performance issues in before they are deployed.

Using performance tools as informal checkpoints during development can filter out performance bugs before they make it into production. Making AutoCannon and Clinic (or equivalents) part of everyday development tooling is recommended.

When buying into a framework, find out what it’s policy on performance is. If the framework does not prioritize performance, then it’s important to check whether that aligns with infrastructural practices and business goals. For instance, Restify has clearly (since the release of version 7) invested in enhancing the library’s performance. However, if low cost and high speed is an absolute priority, consider Fastify which has been measured as 17% faster by a Restify contributor.

Watch out for other widely impacting library choices — especially consider logging. As developers fix issues, they may decide to add additional log output to help debug related problems in the future. If an unperformant logger is used, this can strangle performance over time after the fashion of the boiling frog fable. The pino logger is the fastest newline delimited JSON logger available for Node.js.

Finally, always remember that the Event Loop is a shared resource. A Node.js server is ultimately constrained by the slowest logic in the hottest path.

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Where These Companies Got Their Names From – Part 1

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/where-these-companies-got-their-names-from-part-1/

World-famous companies with the origin of their names and the ideas behind their establishment

The post Where These Companies Got Their Names From – Part 1 appeared first on Hongkiat.

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10 Unique & High Quality Free Photoshop Brush Packs

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/N3c0dx4cWFc/

Whether you’re a photographer, artist or designer, Photoshop brushes can be a huge help. Simulate watercolors, clouds, smoke, grain, explosions – the extent of what they can do is limitless. People seem to collect and hoard Photoshop brushes like they’re going out of style.

The huge demand has led to an abundance of free resources across the web. Even if you can’t afford huge, premium packs, you can still find quality brushes for use in your work. Here are ten invaluable and beautiful brush sets – available for anyone to download.

Your Designer Toolbox
Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Web Templates, Icon Sets, Themes & Design Assets


DOWNLOAD NOW

Ultimate Brush Pack 5

Ultimate Brush Pack 5

Who could say no to 87 high-resolution brushes? These explosive patterns can add a paint-like, textured feel to your images. Great for clouds, abstract pieces and anything that requires a dynamic texture.

83 Light and Burst Brushes

83 Light and Burst Brushes

Lens flares, sunbeams and bursts of light; these brushes can give any image a sunny, bright effect. It also works great for general lighting, magical effects and even as background textures. Along with rays and waves of light, there are also halos and coronas to give the sun a more striking ring.

Bling Effects Pack

Bling Effects Pack

Sometimes a picture needs some extra bling. Maybe some sparkles, a lens flare, or a perfectly-placed light flash will do the trick. The Bling Effects Pack can help you add some pizzazz to a boring picture. Just remember that effects like this should be used sparingly as enhancements.

Watercolor 93

Watercolor 93

This pack of nearly a hundred brushes was created from actual dabs of watercolor that were scanned. There are varying shapes, intensities and luminosities to each brush – so there’s a ton of variety. If you’re creating something that requires a softer look, these watercolors will do the trick.

Hair Brush Set

Hair Brush Set

Whether you’re painting hair or just need a wispy, soft texture, the Hair Brush Set can get the job done. You’ll need a pressure sensitive tablet to get the full detailing effect. Perfect for creating fine, feathery textures.

lazy brush set

lazy brush set

Need a huge pack of essentials? The lazy brush set contains 174 brushes, varying from basics to textures to silhouettes and light flares. It’s great for artists, but many of these brushes can be used in design work too. If you can only download one brush set, choose this one; it’s huge and contains just about everything you’ll need.

Free Brush Stroke Photoshop Brushes

Free Brush Stroke Photoshop Brushes

These 15 high-resolution brush strokes look great in almost any project. Modelled after watercolors, they have a multitude of uses, from professional effects to sketches to grungy art pieces. Basic, but essential.

Free Hi-Res Photoshop Brushes: Acrylic Textures

Free Hi-Res Photoshop Brushes: Acrylic Textures

If you need a rough, realistic, watercolor-like look, these acrylic textures will be perfect. At 2500px, every stroke will be detailed and gorgeous. If your designs turn out looking false or cartoony, these brushes can help them to appear more organic.

Radiate Brush Set

Radiate Brush Set

Looking for something a little more abstract? Great for posters, backgrounds and tech projects, Radiate was created by modifying different shapes. The fringe style is just what you need if you’re trying to make your piece look extra cool.

Mad Fractal

Mad Fractal

Fractal brushes are great for backgrounds, wispy textures and abstract designs. Their randomness makes an image more interesting. And there’s 30 brushes, so your design options with this collection are limitless.

Beautiful Brushes

Finding the best brushes can take some experimenting, so feel free to download lots of them to test out! The sites listed here have plenty of free brush packs to try. Do some digging and testing until you have some that you feel comfortable using. Once you find one (or ten) that work for you, you’ll be effortlessly crafting beautiful art, photos and web design layouts.


Brand Identity for Really. by Tata&Friends Studio

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/i9qU546aZbM/brand-identity-really-tatafriends-studio

Brand Identity for Really. by Tata&Friends Studio

Brand Identity for Really. by Tata&Friends Studio

abduzeedo
Jun 04, 2018

Tata&Friends Studio shared a beautiful brand identity project on their Behance profile. It’s for Everis’ content agency. There are many things to talk about the design solution but for me, the most important is the simplicity. I love seeing projects that rely on simple typography with handpicked visual ornaments to focus on the basics. It’s all the contrast of types and wise usage of white space.

Really is the content agency of everis. As content creators their work range from illustrations, infographics – to video production, a wide range of different creative projects. Really craft contents and visual solutions for brands. Our approach was to define the naming and visual universe of the brand. 

Brand identity

Naming: 

The name Really. is a statement, represents a solution, a final product, something to be proud of. 

Visual: 

We use holographic stamping to create “the metaphor of everything” in order to represent the creative result.


Tata&Friends Studio is ta design muscle for positive brands. They believe in process, research, experiments, curiosity and positive thinking. It is a collaborative studio, a place to grow, to collaborate, to learn and to share knowledge.


The Best Ways to Use Symmetrical Design in your Projects

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/OYioZuhXa5k/symmetrical-design

Symmetrical Design is a form of artwork where the objects or elements arrange identically on both sides of the axis. You will have perfect symmetry when the objects that are mirrors and exactly the same. While perfect symmetry can be alluring, that is not the only acceptable form of symmetrical design.Why Symmetrical Design is Important in […]

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20 Best New Portfolios, June 2018

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/06/20-best-new-portfolios-june-2018/

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism.

Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy.

Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea™, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.

Bruno Ferdinand

Bruno Ferdinand is a designer with strong type skills and the nearly-obligatory hipsterish tendencies we see a lot of nowadays. The guy does simple, beautiful, and kind of rustic design rather well.

Platform: JS app

Yumpic

Yumpic is a portfolio site featuring — and you might have guessed this — photos and videos of food. They specialize in food-related digital content for anyone who wants to make the perfect Instagram account, and also (read: actually mostly) for people who make money off their food. The actual portfolio work is artfully interspersed with illustration and playful touches, which definitely sets the right mood,in my opinion.

Platform: WordPress

Duane Dalton

Duane Dalton’s portfolio pretty strongly reflects his print-focused work, being minimalist and asymmetrical. It’s one of the simpler sites on this list, but no less visually pleasing for that.

Platform: Static Site

Kenta Toshikura

Kenta Toshikura’s website is one of those minimalist-looking presentation-style sites. As is par for the course in cases like these, I’d not look too closely at the usability, but the visuals and general aesthetic style are just plain pretty, darnit. In particular, there’s this touch of 3D-feeling typography that catches my eye.

Platform: Static Site

Ellen Mandemaker

I’m not precisely sure what Ellen Mandemaker makes, precisely, but my best guess is art. And art is what you get from the get go: you’ll see a collage of it to begin with, and then a simple and orderly portfolio that promptly and efficiently throws you into the deep end. It’s one of those portfolios that made me think “I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, but I like it.”

Platform: Static Site

No Plans

No Plans is a one-page portfolio that keeps things fairly simple, preferring a clean design and a decidedly serif-friendly way of doing things. Also, they indent some of their paragraphs. I know, right? You hardly ever see that these days.

Platform: WordPress

Lab101

I’ll never be a fan of sites that change your cursor, but everything else about Lab101 is pretty solid. The overall aesthetic is minimalist and modern, with some interesting touches of 3D animation on the “Contact” page.

Platform: WordPress

Studio Bjørk

Studio Bjørk has a thing for monochromatic palettes, diagonal lines, and horizontal layouts. And you know what? It works out pretty darned well for them. There’s also a significant bit of animation, great type, and some background video here and there, all combining to make a site that a marketer would call dynamic. Oh,

[Sighs.] Fine, I’ll call it dynamic, too. It just sounds so much like marketer-speak that I didn’t want to say it.

Platform: Static Site

Juul Hondius

I often make reference to magazine-style designs ion this article series, but Juul Hondius’ portfolio is one of the more interesting examples I’ve seen lately. It looks like an old, ooold magazine, complete with small spacing issues and slightly cramped text, combined with beautiful and striking photography.

Those might technically be “issues”, but the design as a whole hits me with a very specific sense of nostalgia that just sells the imagery to me. Besides, it’s a photographer’s site. How badly do you want to read the text anyway?

Platform: Static Site

Thu-Van Tran

Thu-Van Tran’s website has one main theme that makes it visually interesting: layers. Every page is loaded on top of the home page like one piece of paper overlaying another. It’s like a paper prototype come to life. Combined with the sheer simplicity of layout, and strong typographic choices, it stands out.

Platform: Static Site

Aristide Benoist

Aristide Benoist’s portfolio combines a grid-based aesthetic with warping animations to striking effect. While most of the text could and certainly should be bigger, the visual theme of this site is enough to make you look, at least. Whether it’s interesting enough to make you grab your glasses will greatly depend on the user.

Platform: Static Site

Datagif

Datagif love their sans-serif type, and apparently spicing up standard layouts with geometric flourishes and animation. This one’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good, even kind of playful for all the corporate aesthetic it has. Give it a look.

Platform: Static Site (I think)

Handsome

Oh, Handsome takes me back maybe five years or so. The large serif type, the darkened photos as backdrops, all those barely visible straight lines. Did we just go back to the early days of flat design? Well, it’s both nostalgic, nearly perfectly executed, and a pleasure to browse.

Platform: Static Site

Sister

Sister’s agency site is living proof that any design style, even the once super-artsy minimalism-with-asymmetry trend, can be given an almost corporate flair. And that’s not a criticism. Corporate-feeling front end design tends to be modern and devastatingly effective in its simplicity, and the same is true here.

Not a fan of those occasional modal pop-ups, though. That’s a corporate trend that can go straight to hell.

Platform: WordPress

Makers and Allies

Makers and Allies is a branding studio in the finest tradition of hipster design studios, but with a lot more motion design added to the mix. It evokes just the right balance of rustic aesthetics with the modern technical competence we expect. Or at least the animation we expect. Whatever, it looks good, even if some of the text could use more contrast.

Platform: WordPress

Bipolar Studio

Bipolar Studio combines motion graphics with a pretty modernist aesthetic style, and good old fashioned big type. Their work basically is video, so it’s they use a lot of it in their design. I do like the little “stats” section at the end of each project page, detailing what it took to complete each project.

It’s just that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the logo could be bigger. With type that thin, it should be.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Akins Parker

Akins Parker’s agency site wasn’t made with Powerpoint, but it’s presentational design in its purest form. You go to see this one for the graphics, not for the usability.

Platform: Static Site

Ian Jones

Ian Jones’ portfolio is another site to embrace the visual grid theme. But unlike many other sites, the visual representation of the grid is only visible when his work is on the page. It’s a dead-simple approach, but it looks calm and professional, and I can’t fault that.

Platform: Static Site

Michael Uloth

Michael Uloth is a rare talent indeed. When he’s not literally singing opera, he builds minimalist-yet-beautiful websites for artsy people. His own site is no exception.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Lasse Fløde

Lasse Fløde is a photography studio with a striking one-page portfolio. Lovers of white space should definitely enjoy this one, as it employs that asymmetrical almost collage-style so favored by many photography portfolios these days. Simple and effective.

Platform: Static Site

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Find Awesome Design Case Studies in the Case Study Club

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/find-design-case-studies/

Huge online repository of design-focused case studies in the area of UI, UX, product design, and branding etc.

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