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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 31 posts.
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Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
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Linux on an 8-bit micro
Dmitry.GR: A successful experiment in running real Linux on an 8-bit AVR.
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The Biggest Myths
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
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ARM64 and You
Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago , the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation . Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going…
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Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
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HTTP Archive: jQuery
A recent thread on Github for html5-boilerplate discusses whether there’s a benefit from loading jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries , as opposed to serving it from your local server. They referenced the great article Caching and the Google AJAX Libraries by Steve Webster.
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Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
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Distributed systems for fun and profit
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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The network is reliable
I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.
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Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
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Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
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Call me maybe: Cassandra
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
18
Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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Readings in distributed systems
This post is a work in progress.Inspired by a recent purchase of the Red Book, which providesa curated list of important papers around database systems, I’ve decidedto begin assembling a list of im...
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Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…
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Parallelism and concurrency need different tools
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
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A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
25
The Go 1.1 scheduler
One of the big features for Go 1.1 is the new scheduler, contributed by Dmitry Vyukov. The new scheduler has given a dramatic increase in performance for parallel Go programs and with nothing better to do, I figured I'd write something about it.
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Each socket should have two file descriptors
What if, instead of running a process-data program on this machine, we want to run it on another machine? No problem. We make a TCP connection to a process-data server on the remote machine. On the local machine, we have generate-data writing to the TCP connection, and consume-data reading from the TCP connection…
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Real-Time Garbage Collection Is Real
Real-Time Garbage Collection (RTGC) tests the limits of what we typically think is possible in production software. You might hear “Real-Time” and “Garbage Collection” together and think “If you truly need real-time guarantees, why would you use a garbage collected language?” or “How is real-time Garbage Collection…
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Call me maybe: Redis redux
In a recent blog post , antirez detailed a new operation in Redis: WAIT . WAIT is proposed as an enhancement to Redis’ replication protocol to reduce the window of data loss in replicated Redis systems; clients can block awaiting acknowledgement of a write to a given number of nodes (or time out if the given threshold…
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Writing a FUSE filesystem in Python
If you’re a regular reader, you might have noticed that I’ve been on a quest for the perfect backup program , and ended up writing my own encryption layer over bup.