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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
In this blogpost I argue why it's strongly recommended to use ZFS with ECC memory when building a NAS. I would argue that if you do not use ECC memory, it's reasonable to also forgo on ZFS altogether and use any (legacy) file system that suits your needs.
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
Good things sometimes happen to the open source community. Since Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, a bunch of technologies were released to the wild, including, most notably, a Tornado web server written in Python. The Tornado is touted as a a scalable, non-blocking web server and web…
[EDIT: Minor edits to fix HTML formatting, style, corrected footnote credit, and code indentation the editor kills on every edit.] While l...
This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to…
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
As everyone already knows, Google released a new open-source web browser called Chrome. Having interest in code reuse, I downloaded the source code and examined all the open-source libraries used. Google Chrome browser shows excellent example of code reuse. I found that they use at least 25 different software...
The frame below is being served was being served by the Arc language web server running on a SheevaPlug plug computer. (I've replaced th...
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
I gave a talk last week at Google (at the request of the excellent Steve Souders ) all about the performance improvements, and new APIs, that are coming in browsers. I cover the new browsers, their JavaScript engines, their JavaScript performance, and then do a whirlwind tour of their new DOM methods and some of their…
Courgette landed in the Chromium tree a while ago but there's been no announcement, so here's my basic understanding.
My favorite Linux tool in DB work is ‘iostat -x’ (and I really really want to see whenever I’m doing any kind of performance analysis), yet I had to learn its limitations and prop…
In this post I want to explore the costs of threads on modern Linux machines, both in terms of time and space. The background context is designing high-load concurrent servers, where using threads is one of the common schemes .
