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Joel on Solid State Disks
One of the FogBugz developers complained that compiling was pretty slow (about 30 seconds), which was leading to a lot of sword fights in the hallway. He asked if it would be OK if someone spent a …
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 62 posts.
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100,000 tasklets: Stackless and Go
I made a mistake when first publishing this and used the wrong date. Now that I've fixed it you'll have to go to the correct page to see it.
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High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook
Recently, we were fortunate to host Jeff Rothschild, the Vice President of Technology at Facebook, for a visit for the CNS lecture series. Jeff’s talk, “High Performance at Massive Sca…
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How not to test that mysqld is alive
I had a call from a new customer last week. They had issues with their MySQL server. Apparently, it was repeatingly crashing, every few hours. To have their production system kept alive, they used …
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Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
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Erlang, Yaws, and the deadly Tornado
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…
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SQLite: A Lesson In Low-Defect Software (review/summary w/ working source)
[EDIT: Minor edits to fix HTML formatting, style, corrected footnote credit, and code indentation the editor kills on every edit.] While l...
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Facebook's photo storage rewrite
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…
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World's smallest Arc server
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...
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Put that database in memory
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
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John Resig Talk: Performance Improvements in Browsers
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…
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Courgette: better binary diffing by understanding x86
Courgette landed in the Chromium tree a while ago but there's been no announcement, so here's my basic understanding.
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Iostat -x
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…
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Why CouchDB doesn't scale
This is my attempt to clear up some misconceptions about CouchDB and point out some technical details that a lot of people seem to have over...
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Why the secret to speedier highways might be closing some roads: the Braess paradox
"All will be well if you use your mind for your decisions, and mind only your decisions." Help me make more videos and posts! A monthly membership directly supports the channel and allows me to make more videos that inspire students and teachers around the world. You also get early access to new videos. Support with a…