Alumni Award Winners

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University.

The 2013 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 10, 2013, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. If you’d like to attend the ceremony and celebrate with us, please register through the Homecoming website.

Congratulations to the  2013 Outstanding Alumni of the Year Award Winners!

The UMBC Alumni Association proudly honors these distinguished alumni for their accomplishments and dedication to UMBC:

Engineering and Information Technology
Jeehye Yun ’97, Computer Science
CEO, Secured Sciences Group, LLC

Humanities
Ricardo Zwaig ’77, Spanish
Judge, District Court, Howard County

Natural and Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Mary Loeken, M.S. ’80, Biological Sciences
Research Investigator, Joslin Diabetes Center
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School

Social and Behavioral Sciences
Dr. Sherece West-Scantlebury, P.h.D. ’07, Public Policy
President and CEO, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation

Visual and Performing Arts
Brigitte Pribnow Moore ’05, Acting
Executive Director, Young Playwrights’ Theater

Meteor is the one of the easiest and robust ways to build real-time web apps. But Meteor is also known for bad performance. This is half true and half false. But that doesn’t mean Meteor cannot be used in production or cannot be scaled.

All of my hacks and findings are blogged at MeteorHacks.

Recently, I’ve worked on some improvements which make Meteor production ready. I hacked into Meteor and changed some of the internals to make it perform better. Also, I’ve tried and tested several proven web scaling techniques with Meteor and the results were promising. All of my hacks and findings are blogged at MeteorHacks.

In this article, I’ll show you a series of tips which can be used to make your Meteor app perform better and make it production ready. Let’s begin.

Use Smart Collections

The current MongoDB implementation in Meteor is not performing well. Meteor does have some plans to make it better, but we are not there just yet.

Smart Collections is a totally redesigned collection implementation for Meteor. It is well tested and used in production. You can get five times the performance improvements with Smart Collections. If you’ve got more subscriptions, Smart Collections gives you even more performance.

Smart Collections is almost compatible with the current Meteor Collection implementation. So it is a drop in replacement, you don’t need to change any application specific code. Here is how you can use Smart Collections in your app.

Install It From Atmosphere

mrt add smart-collections
    

Replace Meteor Collections With Smart Collections

//old code
    Posts = new Meteor.Collections('posts');
    
    //with smart collections
    Posts = new Meteor.SmartCollections('posts');
    

Additionally, Smart Collections has support to scale Meteor apps horizontally and it is currently the best solution.

Think About MongoDB Indexes

When developing your applications, I know alot of you out there simply don’t care about MongoDB. You just focus on the app. Now, this is not a bad thing and this is also why Meteor is so popular. But, before you put your app into production, you must look into the queries you’ve used and add proper indexes for them.

You must add correct indexes, otherwise things will get even worst (this totally depends on your app and how people are using your app).

Read this official MongoDB index guide and choose correct indexes for your app. Additionally, you can profile MongoDB for slow queries and decide where you need to focus.

Arrays and Nested Objects

Meteor’s real-time engine identifies changes based on the fields of the MongoDB document. But it does not support nested fields and arrays. For example, let’s look at the following MongoDB document.

{
      "_id": "ormBGtZwcSZggWhCd",
      "name": "Arunoda Susiripala",
      "address": {
        "no": "434/T",
        "city": "Colombo",
        "country": "Sri Lanka"
      },
      "projects": [
        "node-usage",
        "Meteor-smart-collections",
        "laika",
        "Meteor-streams"
      ]
    }
    

If you were to update country to a new value, Meteor detects this as a change to the address not to address.country. So Meteor will send a full object assigned to address, to the client.

Similarly, if you’ve added an item to projects, the whole projects array will be sent back to the client.

For a small document like above, this is not a big problem. But if your document contains lots of nested content and large arrays, think twice.

Filter Only the Fields You Need

When creating a publication only filter fields that need to be sent to the client. This saves bandwidth and the client will only get the fields which they really need. This might also fix the problem addressed in the previous tip.

See following example. It only sends type, content and _id to the client.

Meteor.publish('projects', function(type) {
      return MyCollection.find(type, {fields: {
        type: 1,
        content: 1
      }});
    });
    

Think About Subscriptions

Meteor keeps a copy of each document related to each subscription on the server. This caching allows Meteor to send exact changes of the document to the client, and it saves bandwidth. As a result of this, the server’s RAM usage might increase with the number of subscriptions you have.

So, it is wise to stop subscriptions that you don’t need in order to get optimal RAM usage.

If your RAM usage is getting fat, this might be the problem. Keep an eye on this.

Use Meteor Streams When Persistence Is Not Needed

Meteor’s real-time model builds on top of MongoDB. That means you are persisting all of your communication to the DB. Now, this isn’t bad, but not every real-time communication needs to be persisted to the DB. For those things, you can use Meteor Streams. Meteor Streams adds real-time messaging capabilities to Meteor.

Read this Nettuts+ article to get started with Meteor Streams.

Disable WebSockets If Not In Use

When a client is trying to establish a connection to the Meteor Server, first it tries with WebSockets. If that fails, then it will try some other technique like xhr-polling.

Your Meteor app or most of the users may stay behind a firewall or a proxy that does not speak WebSockets. In those situations, the above process takes time and it will slow down how fast your app loads for the client.

The solution is to disable WebSockets in your app. This way clients will never try for WebSockets and instead, they will use some other proven technique which works everywhere. To do this, use the DISABLE_WEBSOCKETS environmental variable as shown below.

DISABLE_WEBSOCKETS=true Meteor
    

Don’t Serve Static Content From Meteor

In the end, Meteor runs on top of NodeJS. As we all know, NodeJS is not that great at serving static content. So if your app largely depends on static content, it would be wise to serve them from a CDN or a proxy, like Nginx. How to do this though is out of the scope of this article. But these guides will get you there.

Conclusion

So that completes my series of Meteor performance tips. Go ahead and apply some of these to your app and see what kind of improvements you get. If you know of any other tips and tricks, which make Meteor perform better, please do share them with us.

Though the researchers point that the study's sample wasn't representative of the U.S. population, the findings are potentially groundbreaking. Pew Research Center reports:

"Do conventional public opinion surveys under-report the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population? And do they underestimate the share of Americans who hold anti-gay views?

A team of researchers from Ohio State and Boston Universities say the answer to both questions is yes.

“We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT  [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment …even under anonymous and very private conditions,” the researchers wrote in a working paper just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study was conducted by economists Katherine B. Coffman and Lucas C. Coffman of Ohio State University and Keith M. Marzilli Ericson of Boston University

They used a novel research method that, in addition to the usual privacy and anonymity afforded by the best practice survey techniques, goes further and makes it virtually impossible to connect individual respondents with their answers to sensitive questions. They call this technique the “Veiled Report” method.

Then they compared their findings with the results obtained as part of the “Veiled Report” experiment with responses from a control group that answered questions posed in a more conventional way. Their goal was to see how social desirability bias—the tendency for people to not to reveal behaviors or attitudes that they fear may be viewed as outside the mainstream—may affect reporting on these sensitive topics..."

Read more from the Pew Research Center by clicking "Visit Website" below.

A small sampling of the Twitter conversation around the sessions and programming from the first day of our EmTech conference.

A small sampling of the Twitter conversation around the sessions and programming from the second day of our EmTech conference.

We’re proud to announce the launch of Design Foundations, the latest course on Treehouse!

Design touches every part of our lives. In this course you will learn what design is and how to harness its power. We’ll break down the components that conjure the perfect aesthetic. You’ll also learn the problem solving process and why it’s so vital to a designer.

Start Design Foundations

The post Announcing Design Foundations appeared first on Treehouse Blog.