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How memory maps (mmap) deliver faster file access in Go
Learn how memory maps (mmap) accelerate file I/O, reduce latency, and improve app performance in Unix and Go with real-world benchmarks.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 163 posts.
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How Ruby executes JIT code
Where does JIT-compiled code live? How does Ruby switch between bytecode and native execution? Why does TracePoint slow everything down? This post answers the JIT questions most Ruby developers have but rarely see explained.
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BM25 in PostgreSQL
VectorChord-BM25 enhances PostgreSQL search with BM25 ranking, 3x faster than ElasticSearch. Supports BERT, Tocken, and Unicode tokenizers
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Stategraph: Terraform state as a distributed systems problem
Terraform state is a distributed systems problem masquerading as file storage. Graph state fixes the bottlenecks.
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Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
Oh look what you just made there.
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Odin: Moving Towards a New "core:OS"
The rationale and transition period to moving to the new “core:os”
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Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire
A joyride through the dangers of lock-free programming.
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We built another object storage
High-performance object storage exists, but the economics make it unusable at scale. FractalBits breaks out of the high-performance trap.
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Intelligent Kubernetes Load Balancing at Databricks
How Databricks uses client-side load balancing to improve gRPC traffic, reduce tail latency, and handle ingress with real-time service discovery.
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Building Burstables: CPU slicing with cgroups
Burstable VMs run on a fraction of CPU and burst to a higher level of CPU usage to support occasional usage spikes. To implement them, we leveraged Control Groups v2 (cgroups v2), a Linux kernel feature that helps manage resource usage. We thought our open-source implementation of burstable VMs might be interesting…
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Sometimes CPU cores are odd
TL;DR: all the assumptions you have about processor design are wrong and if you are unlucky you will never run into problems that users do through sheer chance.
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Hitting Peak File IO Performance with Zig
This post goes through how to maximize file IO performance on linux using zig with io_uring.
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Another Crack in the Chain of Trust: Uncovering (Yet Another) Secure Boot Bypass
Binarly uncovers CVE-2025-3052: a Secure Boot bypass affecting most UEFI devices, enabling attackers to run unsigned code before OS load.
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Creating an all-weather driver
Life doesn't freeze when winter comes—if anything, that's when riders need reliable transportation most, when being exposed to the elements becomes less appealing. Today, the Waymo Driver successfully navigates rain, fog, sandstorms, and freezing temperatures. As we expand to more cities across the U.S. and globally…
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Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? – The Old New Thing
The critical section may be an old dog, but it's still learning new tricks.
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450× Faster Joins with Index Condition Pushdown
Introduction Readyset is designed to serve queries from cached views with sub-millisecond latency. This post focuses on the cold path—cases where a cache miss forces execution against the base tables. In these scenari...
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A kernel bug froze my machine: Debugging an async-profiler deadlock
How I investigated and worked around a kernel bug that caused async-profiler to freeze my machine whenever I tried to use a profiler.
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A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022)
Consider this tale of I/O and performance. We’ll start with blocking I/O, explore io_uring and kqueue, and take home an event loop very similar to some software you may find familiar.
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Firefox 32-bit Linux Support to End in 2026
For many years, Mozilla has continued to provide Firefox for 32-bit Linux systems long after most other browsers and operating systems ended support. We made this choice because we care ...
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High-performance computing, with much less code
The “Exo 2” language allows programmers to write “schedules” that explicitly control how the compiler generates code. This allows performance engineers to transform simple programs into complex programs that do the same thing as the specification, but faster.
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When Sigterm Does Nothing: A Postgres Mystery
A story about a bug with logical replication slot creation on Postgres read replicas
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Deterministic multithreading is hard (2024)
Hello, While a lot of time of 2.0 development has been spent on new features and quality of life, we still take care of the smaller details and technical improvements.
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No Leak, No Problem – Bypassing ASLR with a ROP Chain to Gain RCE
After my previous post on ARM exploitation, where we crafted an exploit for a known vulnerability, I decided to continue the research on a more modern IoT target. In this follow-up post, I will take you through building a considerably more complex binary exploit. We will explore the path from firmware extraction and…
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The real failure rate of EBS
Our experience running AWS EBS at scale for critical workloads
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Rust: Investigating an Out of Memory Error
TL;DR: We discovered the hard way that when backtrace is enabled, the anyhow library is capturing a backtrace on every error. Only when printing this error in debug format!(”err: {:?}”, error) backtrace’s symbols are resolved to human-friendly names, thus leading to a significant memory increase for your application…
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DWARF as a Shared Reverse Engineering Format
Create DWARF debug information with the LIEF Extended DWARF editor and share reverse-engineered types and functions between Binary Ninja and Ghidra plugins.