The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of patches to tcmalloc, Google's super high performance memory allocator. I'm going to post about them soon, but first I thought it would be cool to give some background about what a memory allocator actually does. So, if you've ever wondered what happens when you…
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
Some time ago I integrated OpenSSL's MD5, SHA1 and RC4 functions into Go because Go's native implementations were slow. The Go team has ma...
Dmitry.GR: A successful experiment in running real Linux on an 8-bit AVR.
One of MRI's big performance problems is that method cache expiry is global. That is, any time you make a change to any class anywhere, the entire VM's method caches get busted at the same time. This is why you'll frequently hear people saying that "calling Object#extend is bad".
Introduction About two years ago I evaluated the performance of ~20 compilers and interpreters on sudoku solving, matrix multiplication, pattern matching and dictionary operations. Two years later,…
(This blog entry has been recovered for the sole purpose of repairing a link in Hackernews. This blog entry is otherwise hidden on the website. 2026-04-13)
A recent thread on Github for html5-boilerplate discusses whether there’s a benefit from loading jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries , as opposed to serving it from your local server. They referenced the great article Caching and the Google AJAX Libraries by Steve Webster.
With the imminent release of gcc 4.8, GCC has finally switched to C++ as the implementation language. As usual, LWN has excellent coverage. Those with long memories will remember Linux trying to use g++ back in 1992 and retreating in horror at the larger, slower code. The main benefit was stricter typechecking…
At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough…
Hi I'm Caleb Doxsey and welcome to my website. I'm a software developer. If you'd like to contact me, you can email me here: [email protected] .
Attached Code: https://github.com/iainkfraser/cache_transpose Before we begin, the underlined words are briefly described in the gloss...
Outside of initial page load problems, “layout thrashing” is the most common performance problem I see in dynamic web applications. This is particularly true for Single Page Applications which build and destroy views on the fly. However, I’m often amazed by the number of web developers I run into who are unaware of…
Edit(2013/1/29): http-kit is a event driven HTTP server & client for Clojure. It’s open source, https://github.com/http-kit
A little fun for the last day of 2012: how to crash a program via division? x86’s IDIV instruction traps not only on division by zero, but also on INT_MIN / -1 (signed integer overflow).
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.
If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on…
