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An interactive-speed Linux computer made of only 3 8-pin chips
Dmitry.GR: Interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
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%CPU utilization is a lie
I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest tells you how close…
33
Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)
In this post I go through the journey of overusing Kubernetes and how systemd can actually do most of what I use it for.
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A Love Letter to FreeBSD
I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…
35
Zig builds are getting faster
Andrew Kelley famously (or infamously, depending on your views) said "the compiler is too damn slow, that's why we have bugs." 1
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I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to:
37
The Future Is Niri
The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two...
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100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
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Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020)
The way I was taught x86 assembly at the university had been completely outdated for many years by the time I had my first class. It was around 2008 or 2009, and 64-bit processors had already started becoming a thing even in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we were doing DOS, real-mode, memory segmentation and all the…
40
MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
41
Why is everything so scalable?
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
42
A server that wasn't meant to exist
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
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Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Feeling like a kid in a candy store, once more
44
I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data
The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half.
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Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
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Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations
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macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format
ASIF disk images are new in Tahoe, and promise to be space efficient, as they’re sparse files, and almost as fast as the disk they’re stored on. Ideal for VMs and general use.
48
WorstFit: Unveiling Hidden Transformers in Windows ANSI
📌 This is a cross-post from DEVCORE. The research was first published at Black Hat Europe 2024. Personally, I would like to thank splitline, the co-author of this research & article, whose help
49
Convert Linux to Windows
Thesis: We should create a distro of Linux that runs Windows binaries by default via Wine.
50
Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
51
How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
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Archival Storage
I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...
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Debugging an Undebuggable App
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
55
TCP, the workhorse of the internet
What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.
56
Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
57
Running Pong in 240 browser tabs
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
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Why Android can't use CDC Ethernet (2023)
A detective story with a silly ending
59
Basic Facts about GPUs
Making sure I don’t forget what I read.
60
Beating Google's kernelCTF PoW using AVX512
PoW is gone 🦀🦀