The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
For years, the primary bottleneck for virtual machine based development environments with Vagrant has been filesystem performance. CPU differences are minimal and barely noticeable, and RAM only becomes an issue when many virtual machines are active.
Here's the graph of a toy benchmark 1 of page-aligned vs. mis-aligned accesses; it shows a ratio of performance between the two at different working set sizes. If this benchmark seems contrived, it actually comes from a real world example of the disastrous performance implications of using nice power of 2 alignment…
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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.
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
A few weeks ago I criticized a proposal by Antirez for a hypothetical linearizable system built on top of Redis WAIT and a strong coordinator. I showed that the coordinator he suggested was physically impossible to build, and that anybody who tried to actually implement that design would run into serious problems. I…
Day 45: I now have Rust code for executing executables!
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
TLS is not slow, it's unoptimized. A hands-on tour of optimizing nginx to deliver one-RTT Time To First Byte (TTFB) with TLS.
Today's announced collaboration between Red Hat and dotCloud , the company behind Docker, is exciting for a lot of reasons. As the release n...
In a recent blog post , antirez detailed a new operation in Redis: WAIT . WAIT is proposed as an enhancement to Redis’ replication protocol to reduce the window of data loss in replicated Redis systems; clients can block awaiting acknowledgement of a write to a given number of nodes (or time out if the given threshold…
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern in C++ , focusing on the motivation behind it and how to implement it.
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
Day 37: After 5 days, my OS doesn't crash when I press a key
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
Day 36: On programming without malloc
Recently I've been doing some benchmarking and came upon a very surprising behavior from a number of different Intel i7 CPUs (it manifests on Sandy Bridge and Haswell desktop-class CPUs as well as Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon CPUs).
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
Last week, during Tomas ' keynote at MySQL Percona Live Conference in London we announced as one of "previews" of the following MySQL 5.7 release(s) -- an over 1,000,000 Query/sec result obtained with InnoDB Memcached plugin on a Read-Only workload. This article here is just to confirm the announced results without…
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
In this article I want to explore what happens when a statically linked program gets executed on Linux. By statically linked I mean a program that does not require any shared objects to run, even the ubiquitous libc . In reality, most programs one encounters on Linux aren't statically linked, and do require one or…
As I was exiting Oxford Railway Station, I glanced at this screen showing the bus departure times. Notice anything odd about it? sigh Yet again someone has shoehorned Microsoft Windows into a product it is completely unsuitable for. Why does a screen which displays a fairly basic set of information need to be running…
If you had asked me whether or not it was possible to get a 2x speedup for my LazySorted project by adding a single line of code, I would have told you "No way, substantial speedups can really only come from algorithm changes." But surprisingly, I was able to do so by adding a single line using the __builtin_prefetch…
