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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 343 posts.
I’ve been using FreeBSD as my primary server OS for quite a long time. But, for unknown reasons, I have never seriously used it on client workstations. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a CUI-oriented person who loves doing things on text terminals as much as possible. Actually, I have been pretty happy with any client OS…
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...
An introduction to back pressure in systems and why it matters.
A file system is responsible for organising and providing an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored. In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
I have a particular view of Python performance from my experience on the Pyston project, and since this view is somewhat nonstandard I wanted to take some time to explain it and give a motivating e…
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an…
A lot of tech discussion these days is focused around scaling infrastructures to handle huge traffic. But it's important not to forget how far simple optimizations can go.
Some recent backtracking from what we have been calling "Microservices" has sparked anew the debate around that software architecture pattern. It turns out that for increasingly more software people, …
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Using setjmp(), longjmp(), and assembly to implement a simple threading system in C!
NetNewsWire is fast because performance is one of our core values. Being fast is part of the very definition of the app.
In the world of High-Frequency Trading, automated applications process hundreds of millions of market signals every day and send back…
This guide describes how to tune your AMD64/x86_64 hardware and Linux system for running real-time or low latency workloads.
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters …
In a nutshell, NixOS is a operating system based on Linux that provides a declarative package and configuration management.
I've just released a new version of Idris 2 , which is a significant release in that it's the first one which is able to compile itself. Thus, it's the first one where we can really see how the performance of Idris 2 improves on the performance of Idris 1.
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
Usually, x86 tutorials don’t spend much time explaining the historical perspective of design and naming decisions. When learning x86 assembly, you’re usually told something along the lines: Here’s EAX . It’s a register. Use it.
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post . Let's look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let's download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
