1951
300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's total blocking time
How two simple steps improved the responsiveness of Wikipedia's mobile site
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
1952
A terminal case of Linux
Has this ever happened to you? You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff. That’s a useless use of cat. …oh hey cool bear....
1953
The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It (2021)
50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment.
1954
Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go
Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
1955
Jails on FreeBSD
We have had Jails on FreeBSD since 4.0 came out 19 years ago in March 2000. This describes how to setup jails on FreeBSD 12 without any helpers.
1956
I didn’t learn Unix by reading all the manpages (2022)
Originally drafted as a thread on hackers.town , after Abbie Normal asked me to expand on a side comment in a discussion of documentation .
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1961
Io uring
Introduced in 2019 (kernel 5.1) by Jens Axboe, io_uring (henceforth uring) is a system for providing the kernel with a schedule of system calls, and receiving the results as they're generated. Whereas epoll and kqueue support multiplexing, where you're told when you can usefully perform a system call using some set of…
1962
Memory Allocation
A visual introduction to memory allocation.
1963
How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
1964
Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture
Intel investigated architectural enhancements and modifications for a 64-bit mode-only architecture.
1965
Debugging a FUSE deadlock in the Linux kernel
Tycho Andersen
1966
I wrote a GameBoy emulator for my hobby OS (2022)
The Nintendo GameBoy is an exceptionally well-documented system, perfect for anybody who’d like to take a crack at emulation. Publicly-maintained resources like the Pan Docs make it both approachable and convenient to get an overview of the GameBoy’s address space layout, to understand the mechanics of hardware…
1967
Windows XP Activation: Game Over
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
1968
The Great CPU Stagnation
A blog by and for database architects.
1969
1970
Kafka vs. Redpanda performance – do the claims add up?
Apache Kafka has been the most popular open source event streaming system for many years and it continues to grow in popularity. Within the wider ecosystem there are other open source and source available competitors to Kafka such as Apache Pulsar, NATS Streaming, Redis Streams, RabbitMQ and more re
1971
Making GHC faster at emitting code (2022)
How we gained 2–3% improvements in compile times by making GHC better at printing code.
1972
FreeBSD 13.2 on ThinkPad T14 (GEN1)
I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my expe…
1973
1974
Has Apple sounded the last POST?
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
1975
File Locks on Linux
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1976
Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
1977
How to make smaller C and C++ binaries
This blog post presents several techniques to make the binaries resulting from C or C++ compilation smaller with GCC (or Clang). Please note...
1978
The Prime Video microservices to monolith story
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
1979
FaaS in Go with WASM, WASI and Rust
This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here's what it shows:
1980
ACM Software System Award Given to seL4 Microkernel
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust…