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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 165 posts.

2015
61

Why I dislike systemd

As a Linux sysadmin in the 2010s, it's hard not to have an opinion on systemd. But what I find baffling about it is how divisive it is; nearly everyone (or at least the most vocal crowd) seems to either love it or hate it. When I tell people that systemd was the catalyst for my defection to OpenBSD last year, their…

68

Migrating bajillions of database records at Stripe

There are roughly ten thousand bajillion (to the nearest bajillion) merchants registered with Stripe. We recently finished a Very Big Migration of Large Amounts Of Data between several database tables for every single one of them, without losing any of it, without any downtime, mis-reads or mis-writes, whilst running…

69

Coding for SSDs

Translations: This article was translated to Simplified Chinese by Xiong Duo and to Korean by Matt Lee (이 성욱). Introduction I want to make solid-state drives (SSDs) the optimal storage solution for my key-value store project. For that reason, I had to make sure I fully understood how SSDs work, so that I can optimize

72

Unix is not an acceptable Unix

The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?