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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 391 posts.
Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is often called…
TL;DR This doesn’t mean that the scheduler can’t use more than 8 cores. The scheduler controls how to allocate tasks to available cores. How to schedule particular workloads efficiently…
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently...
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…
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…
My inspiration for this article was this thread in r/embedded . There are still many myths and misconception when it comes to the simple questions "Which compiler should I use?" or "Which compiler is the best?". I will try to share my practical experience with GCC, Clang and IAR on Cortex-M ( and Cortex-M only ). This…
A metaphor involving parking meters. Over the years, parking meters in town have evolved into a cumbersome, awkward system. Coins are heavy and you need to have them handy, meters need to be reinfo…
The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
A little-discussed method enables inserting rows with bound data into SQLite faster than any existing technique. This novel method is then discovered to have a drawback that makes it generally unusable. The rest of this article explores how to get the best insert performance out of SQLite generally; what's in your…
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
Building a database in the 2020s
sysclean(8) is a system tool designed for help system administrator to keep their OpenBSD clean after upgrade.
Everyday human reasoning breaks down as the scale of time and space at play increases. Complex systems thinking gives us a new set of tools to better understand the chains of consequences involved, and make better decisions.
A review of "Showstopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary and my own reflections
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
P cores are conventional in that they can deliver excellent performance at maximum frequency, but with high power use. E cores may take 4 times as long for a task, but use less than a third of the …
Industrial production of readable insanity
In the beginning, there was the egg. Then fictional people started eating that from different ends, and the terms of "little endians" an...
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
A few months ago I got to debug and fix an interesting bug in the Csharp virtual terminal library VtNetCore . We use VtNetCore at BastionZero to extract terminal commands in realtime from user terminal sessions as they flow over the wire. This requires feeding the standard out and standard err of a terminal session…
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…
