Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,388 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
1575

A Tale of Query Optimization

Last December, I got an interesting bug report from the VWO support team. It seemed like the loading time of a particular analytics report was ridiculously slow for a big Enterprise customer. Since I am part of the Data platform, a flag was immediately raised and I got involved in debugging the issue.

1576

Unpacking Elixir: Resilience

The nine nines. 99.9999999% of uptime. Whether the AXD301 actually deserves to be held up as a system of nine nines seems debatable. I am not particularly interested in that debate. Erlang has a strong record for reliability and a design intended to help you as a developer and operator achieve your nines. Maybe just…

1577

Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning

Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…

1585

Modern CPUs have a backstage cast

If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…