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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.

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4354

Array

There, that's known as a teaser. You see it in television all the time. "Find out which common household plant devours pets at night... but first ." And then you have to sit through and watch the stuff about Brad and Angelina shacking up / Shaq driving his new Hummer / Hummer's new fragrance before they get to the…

4355

HTTP Archive: jQuery

A recent thread on Github for html5-boilerplate discusses whether there’s a benefit from loading jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries , as opposed to serving it from your local server. They referenced the great article Caching and the Google AJAX Libraries by Steve Webster.

4356

The Day The Standard Library Died

In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.

4363

Amazon's Dynamo

In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…

4366

A performance comparison of Judy to hash tables

Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…

4367

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.

4371

He Who Controls the Bootloader

The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…

4372

Jepsen: Postgres

Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.

4374

A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1

In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…

4375

Bell Labs and CSP Threads

This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…

4376

Boundaries

This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…

4377

JSLinux - Technical Notes

In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.

4378

The Treacherous Optimization

"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.

4379

Performance is a Feature

We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people

4380

A Whole New World

This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.