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How Uber Uses Zig
I talked at the first Zig meetup in Milan about Uber's early experience with Zig: a little about how Uber uses Zig and more about my experience of bringing Zig to Uber, from both technical and social aspects.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
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What every programmer should know about solid-state drives (2014)
This is Part 6 over 6 of "Coding for SSDs". For other parts and sections, you can refer to the Table to Contents. This is a series of articles that I wrote to share what I learned while documenting myself on SSDs, and on how to make code perform well on SSDs. In this part,
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Faster CRC32 on the Apple M1
CRC32 is a checksum first proposed in 1961, and now used in a wide variety of performance sensitive contexts, from file formats (zip, png, gzip) to filesystems (ext4, btrfs) and protocols (like eth…
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We reduced 502 errors by caring about PID 1 in Kubernetes
For every deploy, scale down event, or pod termination, users of GitLab's Pages service were experiencing 502 errors. This explains how we found the root cause and rolled out a fix for it.
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How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)
Fast compact external SSDs are prone to thermal throttling. This is demonstrated during tests writing 96 files, when transfer rates fell from 2 GB/s to around 700 MB/s.
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Husky, Datadog's Third-Generation Event Store
Husky is an unbundled, distributed, schemaless, vectorized column store. Here’s how we built it—and why.
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Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals
so here's a short tutorial on ansi escape codes and terminal control, because you philistines won't stop using ncurses and oh my god WHY ARE WE STILL USING NCURSES IT IS THE TWENTY FIRST FUCKING CENTURY
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My Unholy Battle with a Rock64
I’ve got this rock64, which is an aarch64 board comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with 4 gigs of ram. For years I’ve wanted to put a distribution on here that doesn’t have a premade image available, mainly because out of all the options on that page I don’t actually like any of them. Well, except NetBSD, but NetBSD…
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A lock-free, concurrent, generic queue in 32 bits
While considering concurrent queue design I came up with a generic, lock-free queue that fits in a 32-bit integer. The queue is “generic” in that a single implementation supports elements of any arbitrary type, despite an implementation in C. It’s lock-free in that there is guaranteed system-wide progress. It can…
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Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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Improved Process Isolation in Firefox 100
Firefox uses a multi-process model for additional security and stability while browsing. Web Content is rendered in separate processes.
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Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules
The first open-source release of GPU kernel modules for the Linux community helps improve NVIDIA GPU driver quality and security.
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Mysterious Memset
Where did that memset come from?
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Using Java's Project Loom to build more reliable distributed systems
Building distributed databases is very difficult. There are lots of clever ideas you can put into a distributed database, but making the ideas work well together in a real system can be very challenging because different decompositions of the same problem can massively affect how difficult it is to solve, and bugs are…
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Demystifying Database Performance for Developers
For developers, databases are basically magic. Like Penn & Teller, this blog post is set to break the illusion. Databases are just like any other code, they have algorithms and processes. These algorithms and processes are meant to improve performance, but can cause limitations if they are not expected.
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A Faster Lexer in Go
It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple techniques. The last lexer written, in Go, was very fast indeed - processing 1 MiB of source in about 20…
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Congestion Control Arrives in Tor 0.4.7-stable
Tor has released 0.4.7.7, the first stable Tor release with support for congestion control. Congestion control will result in significant performance improvements in Tor, once Exit relays upgrade. Relay operators: please read!
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Don’t Trust Activity Monitor on M1 Macs
Using CPU % or Energy values in Activity Monitor appears to show that running code on E cores is less efficient than on P cores. Don’t believe a word of it.
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Use fast data algorithms (2021)
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
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Removing characters from strings faster with AVX-512
In software, it is a common problem to want to remove specific characters from a string. To make the problem precise, let us consider the removal of all ASCII control characters and spaces. In practice, it means the removal of all byte values smaller or equal than 32. I covered a related problem before, the … Continue…
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Distributed Systems Shibboleths
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
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Zaplib post-mortem
Welp, this is a weird blog post! Very unexpectedly, we quickly invalidated some of the core hypothesis that make Zaplib work as a startup.
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Why train when you can optimize?
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…