I recently switched from shared hosting to a VPS, expecting to get an immediate and automatic performance boost. I was overly optimistic and ran into memory trouble right away. After endlessly struggling with Apache and mod_php configuration, I was ready to give up. Then on a whim, I switched to nginx/fastcgi to see the average response time drop from 1500ms to 300ms:
At the core of the traditional HTML/CSS developer’s toolkit is a set of nested boxes describing offset, margin, border and padding, known as the box model. Variations on the box theme are sufficient to describe most page layouts, but in some complex applications, it’s necessary to render something more interesting, like diagonal lines, or polygons. There are currently two relatively well-supported web graphics technologies: SVG and Canvas. There are significant performance differences, however, which I would like to discuss in this article.
