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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
For over a year, I’ve been investigating a strange issue with the internet in my apartment. I’m posting the details here in case someone more knowledgeable than me can solve the mystery. I live in graduate student housing with internet provided by the university campus. Usually things work reasonably well, with one…
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Have you ever asked yourself what if we could replace any message broker with a very simple one using only two UNIX signals? Well, I'm not surprised if you
Earlier this week, someone who goes by slipstream (“pulling data out of DPRK’s ass since 2014!”) posted a torrent of North Korea’s Red Star 3.0 installer. My first instinct was to download and run it, because installing software from North Korea, what could possibly go wrong?
Event-driven systems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The obvious commonality is; they all use events to communicate information. These events come in many shapes and sizes, and determining what goes into an event has an immense impact on the design of your system.
In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a working implementation of basic graph algorithms, such as WCC, PageRank and MSSP. For example, I can identify weakly…
So zero-cost abstractions exist?
When writing lock-free code in C or C++, one must often take special care to enforce correct memory ordering. Otherwise, surprising things can happen. Intel lists several such …
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
For decades, the C and C++ standards treated multi-threading and concurrency as something existing outside the standard sphere - in that "target-dependent" world of shades which the "abstract machine" targeted by the standards doesn't cover. The immediate, cold-blooded replies of "C++ doesn't know what a thread is" in…
I've always been told that caching is a tool to make software faster. That, given some careful considerations to consistency, caching makes it so that when...
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
The Windows API — a.k.a. Win32 — is notorious for being clunky, ugly, and lacking good taste. Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job with backwards compatibility, but the trade-off is that the API is filled to the brim with historical cruft. Every hasty, poor design over the decades is carried forward forever…
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
Let's start by looking at a simple C function to be compiled as position-independent code (i.e. -fPIC , for use in a shared library):
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
Many folders have them. They’re so invisible that you can’t even see them when you show hidden files. And the only way you know they’re there is when they cause problems.
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
Anthony Starks has remixed my original Google Present based slides using his fantastic Deck presentation tool. You can check out his remix over on his blog, mindchunk.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/remixing-with-deck .
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them. Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream …
In this post I explore the Amazon ECS architecture and what this architecture enables.
