A fake sense of security that needs to be deprecated — I’ve never been a fan of 2fa, but once introduced to FIDO2 security keys, esp. together with passwordless login, I can’t look back. A password is really secure until you use it. Once used, anyone or anything can have snooped it. Be it a keylogger, a screensharer, a bad web…

How to thrive in a scammer’s market and print for pennies — I bought my printer second hand for $20 and I’ve now printed 8000 pages of flawless text for the cost of maybe $40 in total. There are many layers of scams in the inkjet business and they are not all obvious. Here are my findings for Canon printers. Rule #1…

Web benchmarks aren’t about the hugest number — When we see web benchmarks presenting a gazillion requests per second, the most common critique goes something like “this doesn’t matter for any real world application and people who care are fools”. …

Early HTTP/3 for Node.js with performance metrics — Nightly builds of uWebSockets.js now ship with experimental HTTP/3 support*. Let’s take it for a spin! npm install uNetworking/uWebSockets.js#binaries Just like you’re used to, server endpoints are defined via an easy-to-use URL router with pattern matching and wildcards: const uWS = require('uWebSockets.js'); uWS.H3App({ .key_file_name: './key.pem', .cert_file_name: './cert.pem' }).get('/*', (res…

Early performance testing of QUIC support in uWebSockets on M1 MacBook Air — uWebSockets is an HTTP & WebSocket server library, getting QUIC and HTTP/3 support soon. Right now there is a minimal, highly incomplete and experimental example, recently benchmarked. Compile with “WITH_BORINGSSL=1 WITH_QUIC=1 make” This example is a simple but complete HTTP/3 server with header compression and a simple response. The idea…

Initial performance expectations for upcoming QUIC support — I am currently implementing QUIC support in µWS and as usual, thorough benchmarking and market research is a key first step. As a comparison I compiled the Node.js v15.0.0 source code with the — experimental-quic flag set, enabling core support for QUIC. …

A 12x performance boost to Node.js — I recently hooked up my Raspberry Pi 4 to my TV and because I hadn’t benchmarked something in a while I decided to see if I could serve 100k HTTP req/sec from this little thing, over an actual Ethernet cable. I began by installing Ubuntu Server 20.10 for ARM64 via…

Practical benchmark of TLS 1.3 WebSockets on limited hardware — If you’ve ever checked your stocks during the virus outbreak, you might have noticed that valuations are updated without you having to reload the page. This happens with Yahoo Finance, TradingView and many others. These updates are due to WebSockets, persistent connections that receive updates whenever they are sent. The…

Live updates don't have to be very expensive — WebSockets are everywhere on the modern web. They deliver live financial updates, betting, social feeds, chat, collaborative editing, gaming, notifications and pretty much everything that is not a client-initiated request. If something updates on its own, chances are you stumbled upon a WebSocket. …