2011
More optimizations in the compiler and JIT
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
2012
The Inner Workings of Distributed Databases
Comparison of replication options of time-series databases.
2013
Breaking the limits of TLA+ model checking
Graphing TLA+ state spaces for fun and profit.
2014
2015
Horrible Code, Clean Performance
A short tale of how horrible code yields clean performance.
2016
Unwinding the Stack the Hard Way
Tutorial on how to make a stack trace or backtrace manually unwinding the stack using ELF’s .eh_frame and call frame information (CFI)
2017
OpenVMS 9.2 for x86: Auto boot, licenses, PAKs, networking and SSH
Published: 15-04-2023 22:30 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
2018
Batch computing and the coming age of AI systems
There’s a lot of excitement right now about human-in-the-loop systems supercharged by foundation models including chat assistants ( ChatGPT ), word processing ( Microsoft Office ), graphic design ( Stable Diffusion ), and code editing ( Copilot ). However, these systems only begin to scratch the surface of the role…
2019
Load Balancing
A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.
2020
Efficiency trades off against resiliency
What’s the “right” level of CPU utilization for a server? If you look at a monitoring dashboard from a well-designed and well-run service, what CPU utilization should we hope to see, averaged over a day or two? It’s a very general question, and it’s not clear it should have a single answer. That said, for a long time…
2021
Systems design 2: What we hope we know
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...
2022
Hypervisor Development in Rust
In the ever-evolving field of information security, curiosity and continuous learning drive innovation. This blog series is tailored for those deeply engaged in experimental projects, leveraging Rust’s capabilities to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The focus on Rust, after exploring various programming…
2023
Surpassing 10Gb/S over Tailscale
Discover how Tailscale achieved over 10Gb/s throughput on Linux using advanced UDP segmentation and checksum optimizations. Explore benchmarks, results, and the innovations powering wireguard go's latest performance leap.
2024
Improving Tailscale via Apple’s open source
Updates on innovations and the state of virtual private networks - globally, as well as Tailscale product and company news.
2025
Mac Keyboard with Hidutil
[Update: 13-Apr-2023 with some of the background context and some things I learned from hackernews ] [Update: 18-Dec-2023] This hiduti...
2026
We achieved a 6-fold increase in Podman startup speed
In August 2022, Dan Walsh (one of the authors of this article) moved out of his role as container runtimes architect at Red Hat to architect for the Red Hat ...
2027
Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
2028
SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
2029
Using io_uring for network I/O
Discover io_uring, an async I/O API for Linux that can potentially benefit networking, and learn how to integrate it into your applications and I/O libraries.
2030
Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)
Wouldn’t you like to live in a world where your monitoring systems only alerted when things were actually broken? And wouldn’t it be great if, in that world, your alerts would always fi…
2031
SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
2032
The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
2033
Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
In this article we will learn how to deploy Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. We will first do everything manually with separate YAMLs and then later with Helm. Our k8s environment will run i…
2034
2035
Modeling Git Internals in Alloy, Part 2: Commits and Tags
Understanding Git better by using lightweight formal methods
2036
What I've Learned About Formal Methods in Half a Year
A retrospective on a few months of working on a graduate degree in computer science.
2037
OpenVMS 9.2 for x86 is finally available for hobbyists
Published: 09-04-2023 23:59 | Last update: 11-04-2023 22:29 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
2038
Who invented vector clocks?
Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the question of who actually invented vector clocks. Most people who need something to cite for vector clocks cite Friedemann Mattern’s “Virtual Time and Global…
2039
Closing a stale SSH connection
Suppose you’re connected to a remote host with SSH and after a while the SSH session goes stale. The terminal is unresponsive and no keypress seem to take effect. There might be something with the network, the remote host is restarting or maybe your machine has been in hibernation, there could be multiple reasons for…
2040
A 1.5GB string
In my previous role, I supported a Java service that operated similarly to RDP or Citrix by enabling remote UI functionality. This service relied on sessions, which consisted of interconnected Java objects that were supposed to be cleaned up either when a user logged out or after a predetermined timeout period.