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Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android
By Liwei Guo, Vivian Li, Julie Beckley, Venkatesh Selvaraj, and Jeff Watts
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 120 posts.
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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…
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Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
95
A better Kubernetes from the ground up
If we were to start over from first principles, what would I do differently than k8s?
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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 ……
98
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…
99
Keeping Netflix Reliable Using Prioritized Load Shedding
How viewers are able to watch their favorite show on Netflix while the infrastructure self-recovers from a system failure
100
Raspberry Pi – UASP, Trim, and Boot Performance via USB
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
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Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)
AWK As A Major Systems Programming Language — Revisited
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Jepsen: Redis-Raft 1b3fbf6
Redis is a fast single-threaded data structure server, commonly used as a cache, scratchpad, queue, or coordination mechanism between distributed applications. It offers operations over a broad array of datatypes , including binary blobs, lists, sets, sorted sets, maps, geohashes, counters, channels, streams, and…
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A principled approach to system design and programming
Technical maxims that define Urbit's approach to engineering.
105
Confidential VMs
Google Cloud will now offer the ability to encrypt data in use, while it’s being processed in a Google data center
106
SVT-AV1: open-source AV1 encoder and decoder
by Andrey Norkin, Joel Sole, Mariana Afonso, Kyle Swanson, Agata Opalach, Anush Moorthy, Anne Aaron
107
Using TLA+ in the Real World to Understand a Glibc Bug
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
108
Guide to Linux System Calls (2016)
This complete guide explains all about Linux system calls with sample codes and results.
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Reflections on Software Performance
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…
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Improving Postgres Connection Scalability: Snapshots
Improving connection scalability in Postgres 14. From the neat to the gritty: snapshot scalability edition.
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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
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Timeouts and cancellation for humans (2018)
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…
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The Hunt for the Fastest Zero
Unexpected performance deviations depending on how you spell zero.
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Chrome just got faster with Profile Guided Optimization
From the very beginning , we built Chrome to be the fastest browser possible. The faster Chrome is, the faster you find the information you ...
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A crash course in just-in-time compilers (2017)
This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out ...
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Analyzing the Limits of Connection Scalability in Postgres
Why it’s important to improve Postgres connection scalability, plus an analysis on the limits of connection scalability today.
119
Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …
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Huawei HKSP Introduces Trivially Exploitable Vulnerability in the Linux Kernel
Huawei has seemingly stepped its foot into the kernel self-protection game with the release of HKSP. Absent any threat model and riddled with weaknesses, it also introduces a trivially exploitable local root vulnerability due to a complete lack of defensive programming.