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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
In this post I will talk about some tools that can help us solve a painful problem in Python, especially when using PyPy: memory consumption. Why are we concerned with this in the first place? Why …
A paper on debugging non-deterministic concurrency issues interactively.
I have always wanted the Cone compiler to be fast. Faster build times make it easier and more pleasant for the programmer to iterate and experiment quickly. Compilers built for speed, such as Turbo Pascal, D and Go, win praise and loyalty. Languages that struggle more with this, like C++ or Rust, get regular…
1. Nobody really knows how to do it 2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you're probably doing the computer's job -- "...
Graphing TLA+ state spaces for fun and profit.
I had wrote this before the Unleashed was revealed, so some of the bits on economics have changed. As of writing this, I still stand by my other beliefs. One of the most hyped things in hardware design is RISC-V,… Continue reading →
A short tale of how horrible code yields clean performance.
Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine. However, if your project anyway exposes RPCs for public APIs or would benefit from a schema-based serialisation layer it makes sense to use only one tool that combines these—also for IPC. Microservices for…
unless you click View > Show All Devices, quit Disk Utility, then relaunch it (thanks to xenadu02 for the workaround !)
I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race…
Since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was introduced last year, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express NICs with it. One of the main types of NIC I'm interested in is cheap 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. 2.5 Gigabits is about the highest reasonable bandwidth you can get through the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x1 lane on…
A 1987 technical introduction to OS/2, covering its architecture, multitasking capabilities, API, and kernel system services.
Just wondering how many transactions or writes per second MySQL can handle? While it depends on many factors, fundamentally, about as many transactions as MySQL can commit to disk per second. A modern disk can do ~1000 fsyncs per second , but MySQL will group multiple writes with each fsync. An okay rule-of-thumb…
The database zeitgeist has decided that ANSI SQL '92 isn't enough. We need something better.
Someone opened a PR to implement readahead in Turso. It was a throwaway implementation, but a good excuse to measure io_uring and understand more about it.
The consensus problem is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems which requires a group of processes (or agents) to reliably and timely agree on a single data value. Although extensively discussed in the context of distributed computing it’s not exclusive to this field, also being present in our society in a…
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
Quote: if you DO want to get performance from changing mallocs, make sure to test them with your own app Another Quote: in our humble opinion, overall winner...
This is a follow-up to making the rav1d video decoder 1% faster, where we compared profiler snapshots of rav1d (the Rust implementation) and dav1d (the C …
In case you missed it – we got PulseAudio 9.0 out the door , with the echo cancellation improvements that I wrote about . Now is probably a good time for me to make good on my promise to expand upon the subject of beamforming.
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
Today I want to talk about an issue I was having with UDP sockets in Go, and how I learned more about my program by making use of two tools that ship with Mac OS X called dtruss, and DTrace.
Solving problems by identifying underlying systems
