Relic

Surfing the mobile Web is faster with iOS 5 than with iOS 4. At least, that is the result in a recent test conducted by New Relic.

The company, which measures and manages the performance of Web-based applications, conducted two tests--one in the wild and one in a lab. The results of both tests showed that mobile Web pages loaded quicker on an iPhone with Apple's latest OS than with iOS 4.

The first test measured the average response time for more than 3,000 Web applications, as used by a random sampling of 3,000 New Relic customers. … Read more

New Relic last week released the results of a study it conducted on 1 billion Web pages across the globe this month--and the data suggest Web page success can come down to a matter of seconds.

Using its new end-user technology, the application performance management company monitored actual page loads on Web sites across a variety of browsers and operating systems, including mobile, for the span of one week.

It takes an average of six seconds for a Web page to fully load, according to the research. That might not seem like a long time to the untrained observer, but … Read more

New Relic is one of those unusual companies where an entrepreneur who helped create an entire product category--application performance management (APM), a billion-dollar industry--comes back for a do-over that aims to put his first company, Wily, out of business.

New Relic CEO and founder Lew Cirne (the company name "New Relic" is an anagram of his name), spawned the first SaaS-based APM start-up in 2008 as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Today, New Relic is announcing what it says is the first Real User Monitoring solution from a SaaS vendor.

Cirne compares real user monitoring with … Read more

Graphics performance improves rapidly. We can be confident that each new generation of graphics chips will be faster than the previous one, and that AMD and NVIDIA will regularly surpass each other with new product launches. I've been watching this process professionally since 1996, when I began covering graphics technology for Microprocessor Report.

As of today, NVIDIA is on top. The new GeForce GTX 280 is the fastest graphics chip you can get. See the first part of this review for details of the chip itself.

If you can get one, anyway. NVIDIA says boards based on the GeForce GTX 280 and its companion GeForce GTX 260 will be available "in quantity" tomorrow (June 17), but if previous launches are any indication, those quantities won't be enough to satisfy everyone.

And you may not be able to afford one-- a GTX 280 board with 1GB of RAM will likely be priced around $649, while GTX 260 boards with 896MB will go for about $399. (The GTX 280 / 1GB board I tested was made by NVIDIA, so it isn't necessarily representative of commercial products.)

But avid gamers won't be discouraged by these prices. Both AMD and NVIDIA like to point out that an expensive graphics card is a much better investment than a high-end CPU or motherboard if you care about gaming.

The standard of comparison for gaming performance is the number of frames per second that can be rendered for a given combination of screen resolution and quality features... or, conversely, what resolution and features can be used without reducing the frame rate below a playable level.

So in my own testing, I used frame rate as a metric for games that could run acceptably with maximum quality at the maximum resolution of my monitor (1,600 x 1,200 pixels), and quality for other games.

I did my testing with four games:… Read more