Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 163 posts.

Systems & Performance
2025
5

Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…

6

Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector

Fil-C uses a parallel concurrent on-the-fly grey-stack Dijkstra accurate non-moving garbage collector called FUGC (Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector). You can find the source code for the collector itself in fugc.c , though be warned, that code cannot possibly work without lots of support logic in the rest of the…

21

Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1

NATS is a popular streaming system. Producers publish messages to streams , and consumers subscribe to those streams, fetching messages from them. Regular NATS streams are allowed to drop messages. However, NATS has a subsystem called JetStream , which uses the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data among nodes…