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Introducing Qubes 1.0 ("a stable and reasonably secure desktop OS")
After nearly three years of work, I have a pleasure to announce that Qubes 1.0 has finally been released! To see the installation instructio...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 85 posts.
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This is the mail system
This is how we tell hundreds of millions of computer users that something has gone wrong:
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High performance libraries in Java
There is an increasing number of libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up. Here is a sele...
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TCP doesn't suck, and all the proposed bufferbloat fixes are identical
: While I'm suspicious of all JIT-compiled languages, C# has always had a much better IL than java, even since version 1.0, making it easy...
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Forcing the CPU affinity can make a monothreaded process run 2-3x faster
Today, I chrooted in my system from sysresCD and I discovered that running eix-update (a gentoo portage indexing program) ran almost 3x fas...
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Speeding up HTTP with minimal protocol changes
As SPDY works its way through IETF ratification I began wondering whether it was really necessary to add a complex, binary protocol to th...
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How multi-disk failures happen
Having seen this failure mode happen a couple times now, it's time to share. Yes, Virgil, multi-disk failures DO happen during RAID rebuilds. I have pictures, so it MUST be true!First,
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ZeroMQ - Disconnects are Good for You
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
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The byte order fallacy
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native b...
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3 billion items in Java Map with 16 GB RAM
One rainy evening I meditated about memory managment in Java and how effectively Java collections utilise memory. I made simple experiment, how much entries can I insert into Java Map with 16 GB of RAM?
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Java's Atomic and volatile, under the hood on x86
It’s well known that volatile in Java doesn’t mean the same thing as atomic . As Jeremy Manson says :
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Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat
While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really
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The Opposite of a Bloom Filter
A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”). The opposite of a Bloom filter is a data structure that may report a false negative, but can never report a false positive…
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Don’t Eat Too Much Three Bean Salad. The Server Will Crash.
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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…
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How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
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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.
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Computed goto for efficient dispatch tables
Recently, while idly browsing through the source code of Python, I came upon an interesting comment in the bytecode VM implementation ( Python/ceval.c ) about using the computed gotos extension of GCC [1] . Driven by curiosity, I decided to code a simple example to evaluate the difference between using a computed goto…