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Erasure Coding for Distributed Systems
An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,943 posts.
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The Linux Graphics Stack
This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…
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Turmoil, a framework for developing and testing distributed systems
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
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What to expect from Debian/Trixie
Update on 2025-07-28: added note about Debian 13/trixie support for OpenVox (thanks, Ben Ford!)
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ISO C is increasingly moronic
Varnish is a powerful, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up web applications by caching content and optimizing delivery.
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Optimizations can have unexpectedly large effects when combined with caches
This post is about a non-obvious interaction between performance optimizations and LRU/time limited caching.
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Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
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Why is Idris 2 so much faster than Idris 1?
I've just released a new version of Idris 2 , which is a significant release in that it's the first one which is able to compile itself. Thus, it's the first one where we can really see how the performance of Idris 2 improves on the performance of Idris 1.
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Beating TimSort at Merging
Learn how to beat TimSort at merging sorted lists in Python by creating a C extension. Discover the performance advantages of merging lists compare...
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The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
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I wrote a GameBoy emulator for my hobby OS (2022)
The Nintendo GameBoy is an exceptionally well-documented system, perfect for anybody who’d like to take a crack at emulation. Publicly-maintained resources like the Pan Docs make it both approachable and convenient to get an overview of the GameBoy’s address space layout, to understand the mechanics of hardware…
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Put an io_uring on it: Exploiting the Linux kernel
How much do you know about system calls and how they introduce security risks? We shed light on these interactions and how security teams monitor them.
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ZFS is the FS for Containers in Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) is only a few short weeks away , and with it comes one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a ve...
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Rules of optimization
Rules of optimization: 1) Design for performance from day 1 2) Profile often 3) Be vigilant on performance regressions 4) Understand the data 5) Understand the HW 6) Help the compiler 7) Verify your assumptions Performance is everyone's responsibility https://t.co/CwwJffnHGz
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Every Byte Matters
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
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Why you can have millions of goroutines but only thousands of Java threads
Many seasoned engineers working in JVM based languages have seen errors like this: [error] (run-main-0) java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create native thread: [error] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create native thread: [error] at java.base/java.lang.Thread.start0(Native Method) [error] at…
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Io_uring is not an event system
I’ve been hearing about io_uring on and off for the last couple of years. Its a relatively new technology in Linux to allow high-performance IO with very few overheads. Whenever its been mentioned, its usually been presented as a new alternative to select, poll and epoll. This led me to believe that it was just the…
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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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The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
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FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale
FFmpeg is truly a multi-tool for media processing. As an industry-standard tool it supports a wide variety of audio and video codecs and container formats. It can also orchestrate complex chains of…
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The Anatomy of a macOS App
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
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Firefox's Optimized Zip Format
This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11…
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Lossless compression with Brotli
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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Linux 3.13
Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux kernel during the 3.13 development cycle
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Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work
Starting with v2.0, scheduled for fall 2026, DuckDB will support asynchronous reads of Parquet and CSV files. This can significantly speed up queries when synchronous I/O does not saturate the available bandwidth, as is typical in EC2/S3 compute-storage setups.