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The C10K problem
It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 71 posts.
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John Carmack on Inlined Code
The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…
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Myths about /dev/urandom
Randomness, entropy, and the Linux kernel.
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Microservices
Defining the microservices architectural style by describing their nine common characteristics
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Intel's "cripple AMD" function (2009)
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
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A Whole New World
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
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Call me maybe: MongoDB (2013)
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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DNSSEC Downtime: List of Outages & Validation Failures
Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures
10
Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT
Designed to bring aggressive C-like optimizations to the largest variety of JavaScript programs.
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HyperSwitch
Yet another window switcher for your Mac.
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Call me maybe: Elasticsearch
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
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Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
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You Don't Want XTS
XTS is the de-facto standard disk encryption mode, which makes it look like a good general-purpose one. It isn't. What disk encryption actually promises, and why XTS's guarantees don't travel.
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AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage
[Update: Wladimir Palant has posted a response on the AdBlock Plus blog. Also, a Chrome developer using the handle “Klathmon” has posted numerous good comments in the Reddit discussion of this post , explaining why ad-blockers are inherently CPU- and memory-intensive, and why integrating ad-blocking into a browser…
18
Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?
by Robin Harris | Friday, April 25, 2014 | Backup , Cloud computing & storage | 24 comments
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Call me maybe: etcd and Consul
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.
21
Finite State Entropy - A new breed of entropy coder
In compression theory, the entropy encoding stage is typically the last stage of a compression algorithm, the one where the gains from t...
22
Nick Craver - What it takes to run Stack Overflow
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...
23
We Need Hardware Traps for Integer Overflow
How many problem domains require wrapping signed integers or non-wrapping unsigned integers? Can the current undefined case be replaced with a trap and everything else be left intact?
24
Distributed systems for fun and profit (free ebook)
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
25
The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
26
How Protothreads Really Work
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
27
Performance is a Feature
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
28
Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sine) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place…
29
Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
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Queues Don't Fix Overload
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .