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File Descriptor Limits
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,232 posts.
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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Fast enough VMs in fast enough time
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
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Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines
Canonical log lines are a lightweight, flexible, and technology-agnostic technique for observability that are powerful and easy to implement.
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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Speed Without Wizardry
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
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Potential Impact of Spectre on Processors in the Power family
View, search and download security bulletin information for individual IBM product versions and releases.
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Broken by design: systemd
Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various communities in which I'm involved, including the musl IRC channel and on the Busybox mailing list .
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Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS
My colleague Mingxue Zhao sent me a guest post designed to make sure that you are aware of an important time / clock issue. Note: This post was first published on May 18, 2015. We made some important additions and corrections on May 25, 2015. — Jeff; The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) […]
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Using MySQL as a NoSQL - A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server
UPDATE: Oracle officially released memcached daemon plugin that talks with InnoDB. I'm glad to see that NoSQL+MySQL has become an official ...
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.2.3 reconfiguration
In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB , we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has…
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X Window System Basics (2014)
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
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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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Centrifuge: a reliable system for delivering billions of events per day
Discover Centrifuge—a system designed for high-performance, exact data delivery. Learn how it handles massive event volumes, ensuring no data loss. Join Segment's innovation.
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A bug story: data alignment on x86
This sounds unusual. Who ever wants to do this in real life? Normally, we only see code like this as primary school assignments or compiler benchmarks. However, this time it happened in real life.
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Linus Torvalds on aliasing
See also Dennis Ritchie on aliasing, PLOS article , pointer alias in C and remarks on the purpose of C.
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Must Be This Tall to Write Multi-Threaded Code
David Baron put this up in Mozilla’s San Francisco office a while back:
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Handling 1M Requests per Minute with Go
Here at Malwarebytes we are experiencing phenomenal growth, and since I have joined the company over 1 year ago in the Silicon Valley, one my main responsibilities has been to architect and develop several systems to power a fast-growing security company and all the needed infrastructure to support a product that is…
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The Road to QUIC
QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new encrypted-by-default Internet transport protocol, that provides a number of improvements designed to accelerate HTTP traffic as well as make it more secure, with the intended goal of eventually replacing TCP and TLS on the web.
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How to JIT – An Introduction
When I wrote the introductory article for libjit , I aimed it at programmers who know what JITs are, at least to some extent. I did mention what a JIT is, but only very briefly. The purpose of this article is to provide a better introductory overview of JITing, with code samples that don't rely on any libraries.
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Why do Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? (2011)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
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