A collection of interesting and useful stuff that I collected during March - April. I’ve added a few comments to things that I’ve tried out or looked at further…

• Ruby GC Tuning - handy GC tuning info with performance notes from Evan W. at Twitter. I adjusted part of Rav and got big response time improvements and CPU usage improvements that were in line with the numbers that Evan posted. I posted a little graph in his comments.
• Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant - a super fast key/value store and memcached-speaking server component (respectively). This came out of Japanese social network mixi.jp. Tokyo is file-backed but is nearly as fast as memcached for most needs. We’ve been using this for the last couple weeks to store long-lived cache data that is a little big for memcached. See also this presentation on Scribd and Plurk’s built-on-Tokyo LightCloud.
• Facebook’s growing infrastructure spend - really interesting post from Niall Kennedy. The numbers showing Facebook users vs % of people with internet access per country are staggering.
• Kindle 2 stuff - Jess recently got a Kindle and she is addicted to it. Some neat tricks: change the screen saver, build in conversion of PDFs and epubs
• For all Mac users who are interested in Ruby - check out the 2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment from the robots over at Thoughtbot.
• Sly - I haven’t really been following the Javascript selector speed wars lately but this thing looks crazy fast (well, circa April 2009 crazy)
• Speaking of crazy fast - the new Intel Xeon 5500 Nehalem processors look pretty awesome. Faster, lower power consumption, DDR3 memory with a faster bus, Power Boost (appears to be an auto overdrive/overclock?), Hyperthreading is back. This is a real upgrade and not just more cores and more GHz. I can’t turn up any nicely done benchmarks right now but here is an overview, PDF data sheet is here, and the Silicon Mechanics configurator will give you some idea of how much these things cost.
• OmniGraphSketcher - finally, nice Mac OS software that you can use to turn raw data into nice looking graphs. I’ve only tried it on simple things so far.
• Realtime Twitter Search Results for Google - this Greasemonkey extension inserts Twitter search results into the top of your Google searches. Install it immediately. The realtime aspect changes everything - having this information inserted into my normal googling has been immensely useful and interesting.
• Not purely technical - but kind of amazing. Individual musical performances in YouTube videos layered to create new audio & visual compositions. I’d call them something simpler like “mash ups” if I could bring myself to use that phrase THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube.

That’s it for this month!