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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
I was looking at one of my classic Macs a few weeks ago, and noticed that my Ubuntu 18.04 netatalk server wasn’t showing up in the Chooser anymore. If you’re not familiar with netatalk , it’s an implementation of Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) that runs on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and NetBSD. It allows…
Back in June, I was doing some analysis on a Windows driver and discovered that the INIT section had the read, write, and executable characteristics flags set. Windows executables (drivers included…
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
and determined that most programs reference /etc/resolv.conf along the way to figuring out which DNS server to look up.
How to connect a USB4 SSD to get better performance from an Intel Mac. Should you buy a Thunderbolt 4 hub, or a Thunderbolt 5 dock? Do any of these live ‘up to’ their claimed performanc…
If you don’t want any of their services, you can turn Siri off in its settings, and disable indexing and search in Spotlight settings. Or you can use mdutil, if you know its limitations.
First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. This article details different versions and releases that all stemmed from Gary Kildall's QDOS.
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)…
It's well known that syscalls are expensive. And that software mitigations against CPU bugs (such as Meltdown) even have made them more expensive. But how expensive are they really? To begin to answer this question I wrote a small micro-benchmark in order to measure the minimal costs of a syscall …
How this memory leak probably occurs, which apps it affects, and what you can do to avoid it completely.
Lots of exciting new things were announced at the latest Apple WWDC this week, but hidden amongst the big announcements was an extension of something that's been bothering me for a while.
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
UNIX (well, POSIX) signals are probably one of the worst parts of the UNIX API, and that’s a relatively high bar. A signal can be sent to your program at any point when it’s running, and you have to deal with it somehow. Traditionally, there are three ways …
Implementing the execution functionality of the shell
I've been noticing more and more lately that we have a plethora of libraries and programs written for Go, which don't work on one platform o...
One rainy evening I meditated about memory managment in Java and how effectively Java collections utilise memory. I made simple experiment, how much entries can I insert into Java Map with 16 GB of RAM?
How to use Nom to parse binary protocols at the level of individual bits
Over the past year I've been working on a minimal-dependency hobbyist computing stack (everything above the processor) called Mu . The goal is to:
The current article describes a series of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) benchmarks with a primary focus on top-tier Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers, such as C2 JIT, and Graal JIT. The benchmarks are structured in three distinct (artificial) categories:
I wanted to share a story of a segmentation fault I helped track down this weekend. I thought the final root cause of the segfault was interesting because of how unrelated it was to the code I was trying to debug.
It’s well known that volatile in Java doesn’t mean the same thing as atomic . As Jeremy Manson says :
