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How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
Over the past six months we deployed a new technology that sped up Wikipedia’s backend application, reducing the median page-saving time for editors from about 7.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 278 posts.
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Interactive Programming in C
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
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PHP 7's new hashtable implementation
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
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The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmente...
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The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
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Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale
While JavaScript employs garbage collection for automatic memory management, it is not a substitute for effective memory management in applications. JavaScript applications suffer from the same memory related problems that native applications do, such as memory leaks and bloat, yet they must also deal with garbage…
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Hidden Costs of Memory Allocation
It’s important to understand the cost of memory allocations, but this cost can be surprisingly tricky to measure. It seems reasonable to measure this cost by wrapping calls to new[] and delet…
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The Offline Cookbook: caching and serving offline-first
Update: Together with Udacity I created a free offline-first interactive course . It involves taking an online-only site to full offline-first glory. Many of the patterns in this article are used.
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Make your program slower with threads
Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…
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A quick tutorial on implementing C memory management functions
This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying to write my own implementation, so the steps are going to be fairly similar. The main implementation differences are that my version is simpler and more vulnerable to memory…
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Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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New optimizations for X86 in upcoming GCC 5.0
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How Not to Write a Signal Handler
This website is for sale! 741mhz.com is your first and best source for information about 741mhz. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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Escaping the Safari sandbox with a kernel GPU bug
Posted by Ian BeerTL;DRAn OS X GPU driver trusted a user-supplied kernel C++ object pointer and c...