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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
PowerPC Macs were produced in huge numbers, and a lot of this hardware is still viable for use today, with professional software such as Photoshop CS2 and Propellerheads Reason. They're still good workstations, with lots of productivity software, and no always-online tracking or distractions. Originally, I got mine…
An Upside-Down Backup Strategy I have a strange way of doing backups these days. When I save something, the master copy is in the cloud. If a file exists only on my local drive, it's not safe....
mostly 1990s PC gaming
The cost of thread context switch, including cache invalidation, can reach up to 3 million CPU cycles RTTI can be quite expensive, with dynamic_cast being up...
In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly regarding wmctrl, wmutils, xev, xtruss, xwininfo, xprop, xdotools, xdo, sxhkd, xbindkeys, speckeysd, xchainkeys, alttab, triggerhappy, gTile, gidmgr, keynav, and more. If those don't make…
It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…
Update Nov 30: I've added a version 2, which makes the benchmarks and design overview section in this article outdated. See the github repo for updated benchmarks.
Within the LLVM project, MC is a library responsible for handling assembly, disassembly, and object file formats. Intro to the LLVM MC Project, which was written back in 2010, remains a good source to understand the high-level structures. In the latest release cycle, substantial effort has been dedicated to refining…
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…
A comparison of ideas behind Dynamo and Cassandra
One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency. The very...
Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they're sampling profilers. Sampling profilers are great. They tend to be easy-to-use and low-overhead compared to most alternatives. However, there are large…
Dec 12, 2019 Update: This piece of software is no longer available as I have turned it off due to lack of interest. The article below used to contain a number of links which I have removed. The content below remains only for archival purposes.
As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…
Introduction Deflate compression has been around for over 20 years. It's the format used inside most ZIP files. It's used by HTTP to redu...
While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really
This is part one of a series “ Writing a GCC back end ”. The GCC back end is configured in gcc/config.host and the implementation is p...
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers can result in an integer that cannot be represented in the integer type. We often refer to such error conditions as overflows. In a programming languages…
Link to: https://wormsandviruses.com/2022/07/a-burger-without-heinz/
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
When you invoke a function in an imperative programming language, you pass arguments to that function. But that function may also operate on global mutable state, meaning there are other factors in the operation of that function than merely the arguments you pass to it. To some extent this kind of contextual, implicit…
My last post was about either The SSH protocol or The reason you need to install a karaoke captioning library if you want to change your desktop wallpaper . Find out which .
