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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
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The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
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Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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Booting from a vinyl record
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
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Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON 'API' requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.
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Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
This post is part of my Programming for Advanced Beginners series. Subscribe now to receive specific, actionable ways to make your code cleaner, every other week, entirely free.
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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
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Zero-cost futures in Rust
One of the key gaps in Rust’s ecosystem has been a strong story for fast and productive asynchronous I/O . We have solid foundations, like the mio library, but they’re very low level: you have to wire up state machines and juggle callbacks directly.
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PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
The teeth are not the only problem
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It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
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The 49MB web page
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
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Where does my computer get the time from?
This week I was in Rotterdam for a RIPE meeting . On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.
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FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
And what that means for the rest of us.
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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.
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We have used too many levels of abstractions
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
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Htop Explained
Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux
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I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one…
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Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it
A while ago, I put 16 GB of RAM into one of my computers. The computer is using a Foxconn P55MX motherboard with a Core i5 750. It’s old and could probably be replaced, but it still works for what I need.
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I fixed Windows native development
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency
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ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop
Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. The ZedRipper is my latest attempt to build a fun ‘project’ machine, with a couple of goals in mind: