Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,231 posts.
When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda AWS Lambda functions execute in a container (sandbox) that isolates them from other functions and provides the resources, such as memory, specified in the function’s configuration. In this article we discuss how Lambda creates and reuses these sandboxes, and the impact of those policies on the…
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
The first open-source release of GPU kernel modules for the Linux community helps improve NVIDIA GPU driver quality and security.
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
"Wal2" mode is very similar to "wal" mode. To change a database to wal2 mode, use the command:
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
JDK 16 is out, and as usual, each new release comes with a bunch of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. ZGC received 46 enhancements and 25 bug fixes. Here I’ll cover a few of the more interesting enhancements.
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In two previous posts we've discussed how to receive 1M UDP packets per second and how to reduce the round trip time. We did the experiments on Linux and the performance was very good considering it's a general purpose operating system.
In the previous post, we discovered the potential for data loss in RabbitMQ clusters . In this oft-requested installation of the Jepsen series, we’ll look at etcd : a new contender in the CP coordination service arena. We’ll also discuss Consul ’s findings with Jepsen.
Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages.
It’s terribly punny/dorky of me, but reading your post it just occurred to me one could start a blog called “Race Condition” about being a person of color and being a computer scientist.
ABSTRACT In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of…
From the very beginning of Slack, MySQL was used as the storage engine for all our data. Slack operated MySQL servers in an active-active configuration. This is the story of how we changed our data storage architecture from the active-active clusters over to Vitess — a horizontal scaling system for MySQL. Vitess is…
At Monzo, we’re building a banking system from scratch. Our systems must be available 24x7 no matter what happens, scalable to hundreds of millions of customers around the world, and very extensible. This first post in a series about our platform explains how we’re building systems to meet these demands using modern…
In compression theory, the entropy encoding stage is typically the last stage of a compression algorithm, the one where the gains from t...
I like to think of Stack Overflow as running with scale but not at scale. By that I meant we run very efficiently, but I still don’t think of us as “big”, n...
Updated 11/16/2021: x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Today, we're releasing the first preview of x64 emulation
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The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
