Simon Willison’s Weblog

BLPOP and BRPOP in Redis. Added over Christmas—Redis now has blocking list pop operations. This means you can use Redis to drive a queue server without the need for polling—simply BLPOP against a key and, if it’s empty, your client will block until another client pushes an item on to the list. Multiple clients can block against the same key and only the first client will return when an item becomes available.

# 7th January 2010, 10:50 pm / blocking, queues, redis

Loading Scripts Without Blocking. Steve Souders is publishing extracts from his new book, “Even Faster Web Sites”. Here’s a systematic study of different JavaScript loading methods, along with a decision tree for picking the most appropriate one for your application.

# 30th April 2009, 7:56 pm / blocking, javascript, loading, performance, steve-souders