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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 67 posts.
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Files Are Hard
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
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A Constructive Look at TempleOS
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
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Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
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The Systemd Chronicles
There is a menace which is spreading like a disease throughout the Linux world, it is called systemd .
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Rwasa – A high-performance web server in x86_64 assembly
rwasa is our full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx . It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years' experience with high volume web environments. In addition to…
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Test iOS and Android Audio Latency with Superpowered Latency Test App
iOS and Android Audio Latency Test App with round-trip audio latency data for Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Xiaomi, LG, HTC, Nexus, Motorola, Sony, etc. devices.
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Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
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Please stop calling databases CP or AP
This blog post has been translated into Russian , Japanese , Chinese , and Chinese again . For more detail on problems with CAP, and a proposal for an alternative, please see my paper A Critique of the CAP Theorem .
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To ECC or Not to ECC
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a
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Understanding Container Reuse in AWS Lambda
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…
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Bypassing the Linux kernel for high-performance packet filtering
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.
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Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
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Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes
The size of binaries in the Nim programming language seems to be a popular topic recently . Nim’s slogan is expressive, efficient, elegant , so let’s examine the efficient part in this post by exploring a few ways to reduce the size of a simple Nim Hello World binary on Linux. Along the way we will:
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There Is No Thread
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
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Cap'n Proto: Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, and SBE
Update Jun 18, 2014: I have made some corrections since the original version of this post.
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How to receive a million packets per second
Last week during a casual conversation I overheard a colleague saying: "The Linux network stack is slow! You can't expect it to do more than 50 thousand packets per second per core!"
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Under the hood: Facebook’s cold storage system
Visit the post for more.
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Lock freedom without garbage collection in Rust
It’s widespread folklore that one advantage of garbage collection is the ease of building high-performance lock-free data structures. Manual memory management for these data structures is not easy, and a GC makes it trivial.
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Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture
I was finally tempted into writing this from a Hacker News discussion on “ Debian Dropping the Linux Standard Base ,” where some interest was expressed in reading an architectural critique of systemd.
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Call me maybe: Elasticsearch 1.5.0
Previously, on Jepsen , we demonstrated stale and dirty reads in MongoDB . In this post, we return to Elasticsearch, which loses data when the network fails, nodes pause, or processes crash.
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State Considered Harmful – A Proposal for a Stateless Laptop
Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of varioussecurity-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picturepainted in the paper...
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151-byte static Linux binary in Rust
Part of the sales pitch for Rust is that it's "as bare metal as C". 1 Rust can do anything C can do, run anywhere C can run, 2 with code...