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How did MS-DOS decide on two seconds to keep the floppy disk cache valid?
A stopwatch and a race against time.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,948 posts.
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When TCP sockets refuse to die
While working on our Spectrum server , we noticed something weird: the TCP sockets which we thought should have been closed were lingering around. We realized we don't really understand when TCP sockets are supposed to time out!
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Async.h – asynchronous, stackless subroutines in C
The async/await idiom is becoming increasingly popular. The first widely used language to include it was C#, and it has now spread into Jav...
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Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
Today’s blog post is an overview of some common optimization techniques and neat tricks for doing “systems programming” – whatever that means today. We’ll walk through some methods to make your code run faster, be more efficient, and to squeeze just a little more juice from whatever you got.
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The cost of parsing JSON
The dominant costs of processing JavaScript are download and CPU execution time.
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Going Fast Slowly
Varnish is a powerful, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up web applications by caching content and optimizing delivery.
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Announcing Yugabyte DB 2.0 GA: High-Performance Distributed SQL
YugabyteDB 2.0 released. Read to learn about production-ready YSQL, performance benchmarks, Jepsen results, and Beta feature previews
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Absolute Scale Corrupts Absolutely
The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...
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Efficient string copying and concatenation in C
Martin Sebor looks at C string handling functions used to copy and concatenate strings and examines ways to improve their efficiency.
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A lighter V8
The V8 Lite project dramatically reduced the memory overhead of V8 on typical websites, this is how we did it.
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GCC eBPF for Linux port has landed
This is the mail archive of the gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
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Let the callers of your API control allocations
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
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Jepsen: YugaByte DB 1.3.1
2019-09-05: YugaByte’s blog post states YugaByte DB “passes Jepsen tests”. We feel obligated to state that YugaByte DB’s Jepsen test suite does not pass, though it may in the future. Race conditions in YugaByte DB’s schema system can cause correctness errors. For example, inserting rows into a freshly-created table…
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Teardown of a Failed Linux LTS Spectre Fix
An in-depth analysis of the journey of a Spectre fix into the upstream LTS kernels that left its users with nothing more than a false sense of security.
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The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
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FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad
Compatibility of FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, notes and fixes (HiDPI, Trackpad, camera, etc).
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Good Code Design from Linux
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
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Anatomy of a High-Performance Convolution
It's no surprise that modern deep-learning libraries have production-level, highly-optimized implementations of most operations. But just what is the black magic that these libraries use that we mere mortals don't? What exactly does one do to "optimize" or accelerate neural networks operations?
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Beginner's Guide to Linkers (2010)
This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to…
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The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award
The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…
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Linux Pressure Stall Information (PSI) by Example
[Discuss this article and read other’s comments on the subject on this thread on Hacker News.] The three fundamental building blocks of computers, CPU, I/O and RAM can come under pressure due to co…
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A deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild
Posted by Ian Beer, Project ZeroProject Zero’s mission is to make 0-day hard. We often work...
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A deep dive into Linux namespaces, part 4
Running processes in isolated network namespaces
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Learning SIMD with Rust by Finding Planets (2018)
How to get the most of Rust while keeping your code portable