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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 278 posts.
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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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What Does an Idle CPU Do?
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
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AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage
[Update: Wladimir Palant has posted a response on the AdBlock Plus blog. Also, a Chrome developer using the handle “Klathmon” has posted numerous good comments in the Reddit discussion of this post , explaining why ad-blockers are inherently CPU- and memory-intensive, and why integrating ad-blocking into a browser…
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Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT
Designed to bring aggressive C-like optimizations to the largest variety of JavaScript programs.
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John Carmack on Inlined Code
The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…
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The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi
I've been using 802.11 on Linux now for over a decade, and to be honest, it's still a pretty sad experience. It works well enough that I mostly don't care... but when I care, and try to dig deeper, it always ends up in the answer “this is just crap”.
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Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sine) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place…
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Call me maybe: Elasticsearch
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
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As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes
Fitting as much Stack Overflow as possible into 4096 bytes
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Intel's "cripple AMD" function (2009)
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
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AWS EC2 Container Service
Earlier this year I wrote about container computing and enumerated some of the benefits that you get when you use it as the basis for a distributed application platform: consistency & fidelity, development efficiency, and operational efficiency. Because containers are lighter in weight and have less memory and…
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The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
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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.
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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Post Mortem: A single whitespace character
Cloud printing for retail and food and beverage operations.
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I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
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I/O Thoughts
This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...
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Computers are fast
Computers are *fast*!
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