jodal.dev - performance

Pykka 2.0 released with better ergonomics and performance improvements

2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve finally released Pykka 2.0, the first major update to Pykka in almost six years.

Pykka is a Python implementation of the actor model. The actor model introduces some simple rules to control the sharing of state and cooperation between execution units, which makes it easier to build concurrent applications.

Pykka 2.0 is a major release because it is backwards incompatible in several minor ways. However, the backwards incompatible changes should only affect quite narrow use cases. Mopidy and its extensions, which is the largest open source ecosystem I know of that uses Pykka, runs unmodified on Pykka 2.0.

In this blog post I’ll go through some of the more important improvements in 2.0.

Speeding up a Django web site without touching the code

2011-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve recently been tweaking my server setup for a Django 1.3 web site with the goal of making it a bit faster. Of course, there is a lot of speed to gain by improving e.g. the number of database queries needed to render a web page, but the server setup also has an effect on the web site performance. This is a log of my findings.

Traversable attributes in Pykka

2011-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

In Pykka 0.13–which was released almost two weeks ago–traversing the attributes of an actor is about 8.3 times faster than it used to be. To paraphrase Apple: “8.3X faster. That’s amazing!” (Update: This was written a couple of hours before the news of Jobs’ passing arrived. May he continue to inspire us.)

So, what is “traversable attributes”? Let’s take a few steps back.