991
Sourcehut network outage post-mortem
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,232 posts.
992
How RocksDB Works
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
993
io_uring is faster than mmap
Sourcing data directly from disk IS faster than caching in memory. I brought receipts. Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is scaling and avoid what isn't.
994
Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
995
Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
996
TypeScript as fast as Rust: TypeScript++
TL;DR: This is a proposal to create a language that sits somewhere between Typescript and Rust, and which you can incrementally adopt if you already use Typescript.
997
Systems that defy detailed understanding
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
998
Parallel Sequential Scan is Committed to PostgreSQL 9.6
I previously suggested that we might be able to get parallel sequential scan committed to PostgreSQL 9.5. That did not happen. However, I...
999
The Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) – Step-by-Step from 71s to 1.7s
A step-by-step walkthrough of the Billion Row Challenge, taking a Parallel Java Streams aggregation from 71 seconds down to 1.7 with SIMD and tuning.
1000
John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018)
ps aux | more
1001
Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
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1003
Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
1004
Online migrations at scale
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
1005
OpenBSD on a Laptop
A guide to a secure and streamlined installation of OpenBSD 6.4 on a laptop.
1006
Userspace isn't slow, some kernel interfaces are
Discover how recent improvements to wireguard-go boost Tailscale client performance on Linux. Learn about key changes, testing methods, and results showing enhanced throughput and efficiency.
1007
1008
A better Kubernetes from the ground up
If we were to start over from first principles, what would I do differently than k8s?
1009
1010
A fork() in the road
The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]
1011
Performance Speed Limits
A laundry list of speed limits that your code can’t exceed.
1012
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark
In my previous blog post, I compared the performance of my new ARM-based MacBook Pro with my 2017 Intel-based MacBook Pro. I used a number parsing benchmark. In some cases, the ARM-based MacBook Pro was nearly twice as fast as the older Intel-based MacBook Pro. I think that the Apple M1 processor is a breakthrough ……
1013
The Go runtime scheduler's way of dealing with system calls
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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1015
How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
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1017
PHP 7's new hashtable implementation
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
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1019
Windows XP Activation: Game Over
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
1020
The compositor is evil
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…