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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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Lock freedom without garbage collection in Rust
It’s widespread folklore that one advantage of garbage collection is the ease of building high-performance lock-free data structures. Manual memory management for these data structures is not easy, and a GC makes it trivial.
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Is Your VirtualBox Reading Your E-Mail? Reconstruction of FrameBuffers from VRAM
This document describes a method of reading and displaying previously used framebuffers from a variety of popular graphics cards. In all 4 tested laptops the content of the VRAM was not erased upon reboot. It is also possible to show that the content of the host VRAM can be accessed from a VirtualBox guest, thereby…
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Install OS X 10.10 Yosemite in VirtualBox
A nice blog
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DLL Hijacking Just Won’t Die
The folks that build the NSIS Installer have released updates to mitigate a serious security bug related to DLL loading. (v2.5 and v3.0b3 include the fixes). To make a long and complicate…
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State Considered Harmful – A Proposal for a Stateless Laptop
Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of varioussecurity-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picturepainted in the paper...
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Xhyve – Lightweight Virtualization on OS X Based on Bhyve
The Hypervisor.framework user mode virtualization API introduced in Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) cannot only be used for toy projects like the hvdos DOS Emulator, but is full-featured enough to support a full virtualization solution that can for example run Linux.
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HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it
R&D computing at scale
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Beware of sudo on OS X
There's a little kerfuffle going on over on HN about a newly discovered local root exploit on OS X 10.10.5 , so I thought this might be a g...
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NixOS and Stateless Deployment
If you just want to get in touch, you can talk to me in an emailwardly fashion here .
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Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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Three Tales of Second System Syndrome
In the last decade, three major scripting languages embarked on project to produce a major revision to each language: Perl 6, Python 3, and...
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Microservice Trade-Offs
The microservices architecture can be useful, but to know if it's suitable in your context you need to understand its costs and benefits.
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Node.js: Some quick optimization advice
#NodeJS : A quick optimization advice Can you spot the difference between these two files : that can explain a 50% performance gain : If you don’t, it’s normal, you try to read the code …
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Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
NOTE: This article has been superseded by my more recent one here
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Please stop calling databases CP or AP
This blog post has been translated into Russian , Japanese , Chinese , and Chinese again . For more detail on problems with CAP, and a proposal for an alternative, please see my paper A Critique of the CAP Theorem .
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A few spy tools for your operating system (other than strace)
A few spy tools for your operating system (other than strace!)
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SIMD in Rust
An overview of my work on improving SIMD in Rust.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems
For quite some time now I’ve been trying to learn about distributed systems, and it’s appropriate to say that once you start digging, there seems to be no end to it, the rabbit hole goes on and on. The literature in distributed systems is quite extensive, with lots of papers coming from different universities, plus…
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151-byte static Linux binary in Rust
Part of the sales pitch for Rust is that it's "as bare metal as C". 1 Rust can do anything C can do, run anywhere C can run, 2 with code...
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Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture
I was finally tempted into writing this from a Hacker News discussion on “ Debian Dropping the Linux Standard Base ,” where some interest was expressed in reading an architectural critique of systemd.
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Why Are Geospatial Databases So Hard to Build?
In 2005, I decided to design my first geospatial database engine. PostGIS was unable to keep up with the modest volumes of sensor data I was working with and while I was new to geospatial data, I had skill designing database engines. It seemed simple enough to get the scale and performance I required. Nothing could…