Amazing Tales of Optimization…

…or conventional thinking leads to conventional results.

I’ve come across two articles recently about the non-conventional design and architecture of systems that are yielding some outstanding performance. First up is an article about writing high performance code for the Sony PlayStation 3 (itself an example of a non-conventional hardware architecture).

The second article is a blog post about the architecture of the Mailinator service. It’s a great read about the design of system tightly tuned for its purpose.