Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,389 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
2583

Initial Impressions of WSL 2

Soon the Windows May 2020 Update (20H1) will be released upon the world. This update will contain some nice UI improvements, but most relevant to me it allows Web Developers on Windows to upgrade to WSL 2. This is a significant milestone in the #davegoeswindows saga and it’s worth posting about what it means going…

2591

Billion file filesystem

For a lark I made an ext4 file system with a billion empty files. https://gitlab.com/larswirzenius/create-empty-files has the program I wrote for this. I've done this before , but this time I made it a little simpler for me to do it again: everything in one Rust program rather than clunky scripts.

2600

Reflections on Software Performance

At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…

2601

More on Postgres Performance

If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on…