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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 170 posts.
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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
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Gaining kernel code execution on an MTE-enabled Pixel 8
In this post, I’ll look at CVE-2023-6241, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU that allows a malicious app to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and root on an Android phone. I’ll show how this vulnerability can be exploited even when Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), a powerful mitigation, is enabled on the device.
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The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t
(please note that there’s a correction at the bottom) In the Overview of cross-architecture portability problems, I have dedicated a section to the problems resulting from use of 32-bit time_…
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How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months
Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services.
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Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution
Google networking leaders reflect on the milestones that led to Jupiter supporting 13 petabits per second bandwidth, and what comes next.
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Sieve is simpler than LRU
SIEVE is Simpler than LRU: an Efficient Turn-Key Eviction Algorithm for Web Caches
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Building a highly-available web service without a database
In this viral post, we explain a new paradigm of building simple clean apps: from prototyping to scaling up.
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FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-Precision
FlashAttention-3 achieves up to 75% GPU utilization on H100s, making AI models up to 2x faster and enabling efficient processing of longer text inputs. It allows for faster training and inference of LLMs, supports lower precision operations for improved efficiency.
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Sourcehut network outage post-mortem
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
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We switched to Java 21 virtual threads and got a deadlock in TPC-C for Postgres
We revise some fundamental background and highlight an important concern behind Java 21 virtual threads: deadlocks might be unpredictable
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The V8 Sandbox
V8 features a lightweight, in-process sandbox to limit the impact of memory corruption bugs
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Making EC2 boot time faster
It's possible to cut EC2 boot time from 40 seconds to 5 seconds by combining several optimizations like root volume streaming, instance warm pools, and instance resizing.
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The Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) – Step-by-Step from 71s to 1.7s
A step-by-step walkthrough of the Billion Row Challenge, taking a Parallel Java Streams aggregation from 71 seconds down to 1.7 with SIMD and tuning.
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How to get the most out of Postgres memory settings
Engineering deep-dives, product updates, and company news from Tembo — the platform for running coding agents across your stack.
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How we found and fixed an eBPF Linux kernel vulnerability
This blog post takes a look at the years where eBPF was one of the kernel subsystems that grabbed the attention of a lot of security researchers. We will tell the story of how we discovered CVE-2023-2163, what our root-cause analysis process looked like, and what we did to ultimately fix the issue.
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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
Many companies are running old Postgres versions and missing out on many improvements. The reasons: Postgres works and upgrades suck.
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Understanding SIMD: Infinite complexity of trivial problems
A deep dive into the complexities of optimizing code for SIMD instruction sets across multiple platforms.
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1BRC merykitty's magic SWAR: 8 lines of code explained in 3k words
A deep dive into merykitty's 8-line SWAR temperature parser from the One Billion Row Challenge, using bitwise tricks and ALU magic with no loops or branches.
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Noisy neighbor detection with eBPF
By Jose Fernandez, Sebastien Dabdoub, Jason Koch, Artem Tkachuk
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From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story
So, there's this function. It's called a lot. More importantly, all those calls are on the critical path of a key user interaction. Let's talk about making it fast.
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How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite
Notion engineers sped up Notion's browser speed with WASM SQLite
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A deep dive into Linux's new mseal syscall
If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is…
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LLVM-powered devirtualization
Virtualization is a powerful technique for code obfuscation, and reversing it can be challenging. In this post, we cover the work done during an internship on developing an automated devirtualization tool. We explore a simplified taint-based approach and discuss its limitations. For a more in-depth analysis, the full…
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Good Retry, Bad Retry
Sometimes, a seemingly simple and obvious solution can lead to a series of problems later on. This is especially true when adding retries.
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Linux When?
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten talks to Mikayla, who's been leading the effort to Zed working on Linux, about the Zed's Linux version and how it's taking shape
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macOS 14.4 causes JVM crashes
Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update