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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 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…
Where Flow-based Programming stands after 50 years since its introduction. What problems it solves today. And what problems it can solve tomorrow for broader Software Engineering industry
Last week, during Tomas ' keynote at MySQL Percona Live Conference in London we announced as one of "previews" of the following MySQL 5.7 release(s) -- an over 1,000,000 Query/sec result obtained with InnoDB Memcached plugin on a Read-Only workload. This article here is just to confirm the announced results without…
While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB. In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5. Unlike most…
In this post, we’ll look at the new loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web!. For the curious, here’s a ...
With the new C++11 Standard, C++ faces the first time challenges of multicore architectures. The 2011 published standard defines how a C++ program has to behave in the presence of multiple threads. The C++11 multithreading capabilities are composed of two components. This is, on the one hand, the defined memory model…
Having spent the last four years rolling out a handful of service oriented architectures, some lessons are finally coming together, and this is an attempt at documenting them.
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
In my previous post , I mentioned that I found a number of oddities when digging through the details of various Atari 8-bit file systems. I...
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used…
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
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...
Following my previous post on rate limiting with GCRA, leaky buckets without the buckets , I reviewed my old notes on rate limiting for Exim . I thought I should do a new write-up of the ideas that I hope will be more broadly interesting.
: While I'm suspicious of all JIT-compiled languages, C# has always had a much better IL than java, even since version 1.0, making it easy...
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…
The futex (short for "Fast userspace mutex") mechanism was proposed by Linux contributors from IBM in 2002 [1] ; it was integrated into the kernel in late 2003. The main idea is to enable a more efficient way for userspace code to synchronize multiple threads, with minimal kernel involvement.
Published: 01-08-2026 20:08 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
If you asked software engineers some of their “least hated” things, you’ll likely hear both UTF-8 and TCP. TCP, despite being 35 years old, is rock-solid, stable infrastructure that we take for granted today; it’s hard to sometimes realize that TCP was man-made, given how well it’s served us. But within every single…
Want to use App Shortcuts in Mojave? You’re out of luck because its broken, and Apple can’t be bothered to fix it.
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…
Modern processors are superscalar, meaning that they can execute many instructions at once. For example, some processors can retire four or six instructions per cycle. Furthermore, many of these processors can initiate instructions out-of-order: they can start working on instructions that appear much later in the…
Update to this story at 20 Feb 2018: I’ve been debugging the problem together with Apple and I feel like we are closing in on a solution. My current guess is that Finder indexing needs a lot more time on High Sierra than on Sierra clients.
At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…
Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information for Minisforum V3 users, including some workarounds for the issues mentioned in this review. Quest for the Ideal
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
