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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.

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3153

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a…

3161

Simpler Backoff

Exponential backoff with jitter is de rigeur for making service calls. This code, or something like it, probably looks really familiar: func do(ctx context.Context) error { const ( maxAttempts = 10 baseDelay = 1 * time.Second maxDelay = 60 * time.Second ) delay := baseDelay for attempt := range maxAttempts { err :=…

3167

Upgrading my old Chumby 8 Linux kernel

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8″ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with…

3169

Using OpenBSD Relayd(8) as an Application Layer Gateway

I was lucky enough to attend to EuroBSDCon 2023 and offered the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite OpenBSD stock daemon: relayd(8). The talk was recorded and made available on the EuroBSDCon YouTube channel. . One may check the EuroBSDCon 2023 program for more material. This post attempts a reboot of the…

3180

Co-routines as an alternative to state machines (2009)

When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…