performance

6 articles · newest first

Photograph of a long line of identical unmarked freight containers at dawn with one container open and glowing warm light

pandas read_csv is slow on a big CSV? Five fixes, timed on a 257 MB file

Syntax here. An AI wrote your script, it works, and then it sits on read_csv for ten seconds. The pandas docs name five levers. I timed each on a 3-million-row file, and the one everyone reaches for first barely moved the clock.

Aliteq Team · 6d ago · 8 min

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Slow Local LLM? Speculative Decoding Explained for llama.cpp and vLLM

A small model guesses the next few words and the big one checks them all at once. Same answers, fewer slow steps. What the original paper measured, what llama.cpp and vLLM actually let you switch on, and when it won't help.

Aliteq Team · 6d ago · 9 min

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Software

Postgres query slow? When to add an index, and when it makes things worse

An index speeds up reads and taxes every write. Here is when it pays, how to order the columns, and how to read EXPLAIN, using the PostgreSQL docs and our own price table, where five indexes take up more room than the data.

Aliteq Team · Oct 9 · 9 min

Photographic wide shot of a dark, hazy data-center hall, rows of server racks lit only by small green and red indicator lights, conveying large scale

BuildInteractive

It worked with ten users. Then a hundred showed up at once.

What happens to a vibe-coded app when it suddenly gets popular, the two ways to handle it, and why "works for ten" isn't "works for ten thousand". Tap to add users.

Aliteq Team · Sep 26 · 4 min

Editorial infographic contrasting a slow first request that computes an answer with a fast repeat request served instantly from a labelled cache box

Build

You fixed the typo. Visitors still see the old version. Here's why.

A cache keeps a ready-made copy so pages load instantly — most of the web's speed, and the classic bug where old data won't go away. What its lifetime (TTL) controls.

Aliteq Team · Sep 26 · 4 min

Realistic painterly illustration of a lone courier racing along a very long winding road at dusk, a distant city glowing far ahead

BuildInteractive

Your app is fast for you and slow for everyone else — the reason is geography

Latency is the wait between a request and its answer, and distance is the biggest cause. Why far-away users feel the lag, and the one thing that fixes most of it. Tap the ladder.

Aliteq Team · Sep 26 · 4 min