One of the biggest stories of 2021 — the investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organizations, published in July — suggested that over 30,000 human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world may have been targeted using Pegasus. Pegasus is a so-called “legal surveillance software” developed by the Israeli company NSO.

For Android user, see Pegasus, Chrysaor and other APT mobile malware on how to stay safe from Pegasus and other APT mobile malware.

For iPhone user, start by disabling iMessage, FaceTime and then enable Lockdown mode. Reboot daily. This takes care of 90% of the things out there. It’s virtually imposible to prevent infection by Pegasus (tweet).

Ruby

Ruby 3.2 YJIT is Battle-Tested

Shopify deploys YJIT on business-critical services in production, such as Storefront Renderer, the software that powers all online storefronts on Shopify’s platform, and Shopify’s Monolith. As of the Ruby 3.2 release, YJIT sped up our Storefront Renderer by 10% on average.

Storefront Renderer is a complex application. Your more reasonable-sized app might get better/worse results. Here are some other YJIT performance results in production outside Shopify:

  • Discourse: 15.8-19.6% speedup
  • Lobsters: 26% speedup
  • CompanyCam: 20-40% speedup
  • GMO Pepabo: 18% speedup (in Japanese)
  • Timee: 10% speedup (in Japanese)
  • STORES: 6.5-7.5% speedup (in Japanese)
  • MedPeer: 2.8% speedup (in Japanese)

Ruby 3.3 YJIT is even faster. Ruby 3.3.0-preview2 has been released on Sep 14th, 2023. Below is the result performance comparison of Ruby 3.2 YJIT, Ruby 3.3-preview2 YJIT, and Ruby 3.3-preview2 interpreter on the Storefront Renderer. It’s a large-scale service with the following properties:

  • Depends on over 220 Ruby gems
  • Over 4.5 million e-commerce sites are built with Shopify (source: builtwith.com)
  • Capable of serving over 75 million requests per minute, 3TB/minute of traffic
  • 1.27 million requests per second
  • Processed over 197B$ in transaction volume in 2022.

See Ruby 3.3’s YJIT Runs Shopify’s Production Code 15% Faster for more detail.

Rails App with over 1M SQL SELECT queries per second

Aurora Database with Ruby on Rails and Active Record can handle over 1 million SQL SELECT queries per second (tweet).

PostgreSQL

Securing Your PostgreSQL Database

This is the first in a series of articles about an overview of best practices for securing your databases with security best practices including Network-level security, Transport-level security, and Database-level security. Read more about this on Securing Your PostgreSQL Database.

Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan

Great explanation from Thoughtbot on how to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE. See Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan for the detail.

macOS

Diving into a hidden macOS tool - networkQuality

The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. In this post, the author explains how to use the networkQuality tool and some of its key features. Read more.

KAK Labs Blog Posts

I’ve published some blog posts:

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