Google says its new Chrome 17 browser will be very fast
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Jan. 9, 2012
Google is promising that its new Chrome 17 browser will start loading web pages even before you've completed the URL!
The new browser can now be downloaded in beta version.
Chrome 17 loads some pages in the background and if the URL auto-completes then Chrome will begin pre-rendering the web
page. It's a new way of doing things, and Google is obviously proud of it and they should be.
Google software engineer Dominic Hamon wrote "Pre-rendering pages reduces the time between when you hit Enter and
when you see your fully loaded web page-- and in certain cases the web page appears almost instantly."
Google didn't provide any statistical data on how fast the new Chrome will be, however, but we can now see that it is,
and by at least 50 percent faster than before.
And internet security is also improved somewhat in Chrome 17. The new browser is being built to protect users against
malicious websites that try to convince them to download and run harmful files or to download viruses or malware.
Chrome includes expanded functionality to analyse executable files such as .exe and .msi files, Google said. Hamon
added "If a file you download is known to be bad, or is hosted on a website that hosts a relatively high percentage of
malicious downloads, Chrome will warn you that the file appears to be malicious and that you should discard it."
Google hopes to expand the number of malicious files covered by Chrome in the coming months. The company didn't specify
what's the precise date that the stable release of Chrome 17 will be available for download, however.
In other hi tek news
Storage memory provider Fusion-io said today that it has achieved a billion IOPS from just 8 servers.
The company organized a benchmark testing session at the DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco yesterday.
The testing required only 8 HP DL-370 G6 servers, running Linux on two, 6-core Intel processors and with 96 GB of RAM.
Each server was equipped with eight 2.4 TB ioDrive2 Duo PCIE flash drives-- that's 19.2 TB of flash memory per server
and 153.6 TB of flash in total.
The demonstration used a custom load-generator that ran at 125 million ops/sec on each server and transferred 64 byte
data packets.
Fusion-io said that the ioDrives used Auto Commit Memory (ACM) software, a function in its ioMemory VSL subsystem. It
allows application and system developers direct control of the data path to persistent (NAND flash) memory and significantly
reduces latency and system overhead in transferring data, according to the company.
What's more, fusion says that data integrity is maintained "by the ioMemory architecture’s ability to flush all
in-flight data, even if the power is abruptly cut, without the need for added storage capacitors in the servers' power
supplies, UPSs or external batteries."
The concept is to remove latency and O/S overhead from the access to data. David Flynn, Fusion's chairman and CEO,
said "This isn't something that could be achieved with hardware alone. Intelligent software that optimises NAND flash
as a low latency, high-capacity, non-volatile memory solution for enterprise servers can transform the way organizations
process the immense amounts of data that powers our lives today, and at speeds that were previously unattainable so far.”
Steve Wozniak, one of the two co-founders of Apple and that has worked with Steve Jobs for over twenty years, and now
Fusion-io's Chief Scientist, said “Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel
subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new
programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory.”
The demo preview system had 64 ioDrive 2 Duos, each with 2.4 TB of storage capacity. Flynn said existing 2.4 TB ioDrive
2 Duos do around a million IOPS. Each one in the demo system delivered 16 million IOPS, a sixteen-fold improvement in
performance.
This comes from avoiding using the host OS' I/O subsystem at all. Instead, the iODRive capacity is seen by enterprise
applications as an area of memory. Flynn said apps simply read or write data from an area of RAM, using CPU Load Store
instructions.
Fusion-io uses an ACM API to do this and so would need writing or rewriting to do so. Flynn said apps could be somehow
fooled into thinking they were still using the host OS's I/O pathways, even tough they are not, which would make the adoption
of ACM by existing software somewhat easier.
Source: Google.
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