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How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 101 posts.
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A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Imagine you wrote a program for a pleasingly parallel problem, where each thread does its own independent piece of work, and the threads don’t need to coordi...
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Speed Is the Killer Feature
Teams consistently overlook speed. Instead, they add more features (which ironically make things slower). Products bloat over time and performance goes downhill.
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Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/S IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation
TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now…
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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with
This post contains my own opinions, not the opinions of my employer or any open source groups I belong or contribute to.
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V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler
In V8 v9.1 we’re improving V8 performance by 5–15% with Sparkplug: a new, non-optimizing JavaScript compiler.
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Apple Silicon Hardware: SPRR and Guarded Exception Levels (GXF)
Over a year ago siguza published a write-up about Apple’s APRR - a custom ARM extension that redefines pagetable permissions and protects certain parts of the kernel from itself. Since then Apple has released their M1 chip which not only features an updated version of APRR but also easily allows to run bare-metal code…
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Using load shedding to avoid overload
How Amazon uses load shedding to stay available under overload, rejecting excess work early so the system keeps serving requests it can handle.
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Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
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Fast Rust Builds
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
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Linux x86 program start up – How the heck do we get to main()? (2011)
This is for people who want to understand how programs get loaded under linux. In particular it talks about dynamically loaded x86 ELF files. The information you learn will let you understand how to debug problems that occur in your program before main starts up. Everything I tell you is true, but some things will be…
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An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
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Tiny ELF Files: Revisited in 2021
Quick edit: While I work on a proper update, I'll note here that several posters on reddit and hackernews have pointed out ways to bring the total size of the program down to 105 bytes while still printing the full "Hello, world!" Much credit goes to Josh Triplett , who produced the 105-byte version which you can find…
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How to Write a Computer Emulator
I wrote this document after receiving large amounts of email from people who would like to write an emulator of one or another computer but do not know where to start. Any opinions and advices contained in the following text are mine alone and should not be taken for an absolute truth. The document mainly covers…
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The surprising subtleties of zeroing a register (2012)
Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The mo…
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Privilege escalation with polkit: How to get root on Linux with a seven-year-ol
polkit is a system service installed by default on many Linux distributions. It’s used by systemd, so any Linux distribution that uses systemd also uses polkit.
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Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux
A year ago at BUILD 2020 we introduced our goal to bring Linux GUI applications to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Linux GUI applications. We
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How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
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DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
Firefox will monitor available system memory and, should it become that a crash is imminent, Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy.
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Improving large monorepo performance on GitHub
GitHub has done a lot of work in the last six months to improve performance for large monorepos.
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So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here , here , and here ), at the Kangrejos Rust for Linux Workshop ( here , here , and here ) and 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit . At least…
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An update on Android's audio latency
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
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Ncdu 2: Less hungry and more Ziggy
Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a terminal-based disk usage analyzer for Linux and other POSIX-y systems, (formerly) written in C and available in the package repositories of most distributions.
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The Rust compiler has gotten faster again
I worked on Rust part-time for several years at Mozilla. During that period I regularly summarized how the compiler’s performance had improved. For example: 2017-11-12 to 2019-07-24.
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32 Bit Real Estate
Apps on Fly.io all get their own routable IPv4 addresses. Here's what that costs us.
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We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow
We rendered the top 1 million pages on the web, tracking every conceivable performance metric, logging every error, noting every requested URL. To our knowledge this produces the first dataset that connects performance, errors, and library use on the web. In this article we analyze what the data can tell us about…
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