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Measuring memory usage in Python: it’s tricky
Measuring your Python program’s memory usage is not as straightforward as you might think. Learn two techniques, and the tradeoffs between them.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 358 posts.
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Why query planning for streaming systems is hard
Many groups are working on running sql queries in incremental/streaming systems . Query planning in this context is not a well understood problem. This post is a quick pointer towards the many open problems. It's not intended to be complete or authoritative, because I haven't engaged with the problem much beyond…
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C++ Exceptions: Under the Hood (2013)
Index A tiny ABI An ABI to appease the linker Catching what you throw Magic around __cxa_begin_catch and __cxa_end_catch Gcc...
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Correctly implementing a spinlock in Modern C++
I’ve seen a lot of poorly implemented spinlocks floating around the internet.
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The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005)
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
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When you have too much memory for SheepShaver
When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill. While Be only off...
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64-Bit Linux Return-Oriented Programming
Update : Dongli Zhang reports that newer Linux versions organize the stack differently . The code below will need to be modified accordingly.
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A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)
This article is the sequel to A Universal Async Abstraction for C++ , in which I talk about the Executor proposal targeting C++23. Quite a bit happened since then.
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Faster Mac dev tools with custom allocators
Introduction
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Static Executables with SBCL v2
It's taken me much longer than I hoped, but I finally have a second version of my patches to build static executables tested and ready to go! This set of patches vastly improves upon the first by reducing the amount of compilation needed at the cost of sacrificing a little purity. Additionally I have created a system…
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PipeWire Under the Hood
The PipeWire project is slowly getting popular as it matures. Its documentation is still relatively sparse but is gradually growing. However, it's always a good idea to have people from outside the project try to grasp and explain it to others in their own words, reiterating ideas, seeing them from their own…
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Tar is an ill-specified format (2015)
http://invisible-island.net/ autoconf/ Copyright © 2014–2015,2016 by Thomas E. Dickey
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Docker in Production: A History of Failure (2016)
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i…
316
Switching to the i3 window manager
After using the awesome window manager for 10 years, I have switched to i3, another tiling window manager with a different philosophy.
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The surprising subtleties of zeroing a register (2012)
Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The mo…
318
Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi? Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots: 1 x16 slot (with x1 lane) in the standard ITX location…
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Why Specifications Don't Compose
Recently my friend Lars Hupel and I had a discussion on why formal methods don’t compose well. You can read the conversation here. We focused mostly on composing formally-verified code. I want to talk a little more about the difficulties in composing specifications. This is half because it’s difficult for interesting…
320
Isolating Xwayland in a VM
In my last post, Qubes-lite with KVM and Wayland, I described setting up a Qubes-inspired Linux system that runs applications in virtual machines. A …
321
Reading NFS at 25GB/s using FIO and libnfs
My current employer does a lot of really cool systems work that’s covered by NDAs. I recently did some work to integrate a cool open source tool into our workflow. Felt it deserved a blog post. NFS Testing Requires Parallelism. I work for Pure Storage. One of the products we make is a scale-out NFS1 (and…
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On Cache Invalidation: Why Is It Hard? (2018)
Many people must have heard this quote (by Phil Karlton) many times: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Two days ago, Nick Tierney mentioned it …
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Which is not Posix
I learn a non-trivial number of things, because there’s Debian drama about them. The fact that the which command is not part of any standard just joined the flock.
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The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
world wide web benji-style
325
Writing Your First Kernel Module (2019)
Kernel modules are code components that can be loaded and unloaded by the kernel when required. They are used to extend the functionality…
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EC2 Boot Time Benchmarking
Once I finished writing ec2-boot-bench, the natural next step was to run some tests — in particular, to see how FreeBSD compared to other operating systems used in EC2. I used the c5.xlarge instance type and tested FreeBSD releases since 11.1-RELEASE (the first FreeBSD release which can run on the c5.xlarge instance…
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Code in ARM Assembly: Registers Explained
Types of register explained, and which are available to pass arguments of different types. Call by value and call by reference distinguished.
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How to write slow Rust code
I have recently published a blog post that, as I had expected (actually, hoped for, as that would attract people to contribute to the “study”), generated quite some polemic on the Internet!