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Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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PulseAudio under the hood
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Booting Linux in QEMU and Writing PID 1 in Go to Illustrate Kernel as Program
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes. In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
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Modernizing “less”
I have just spent an all-nighter doing something I didn't expect to do. I've " modernized " less (1). (That link is to the changeset.) ...
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Installing Every Arch Package
Using algorithms and Julia to install as many packages as possible from the Arch Linux official repositories
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Fast B-Trees
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
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John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018)
ps aux | more
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Testing Distributed Systems
Curated list of resources on testing distributed systems
1001
It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
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C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines
In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life.
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Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads
Broadcom pulled public VMware VDDK downloads, creating new challenges for customers migrating to Azure, Nutanix, OpenShift, KVM, and other platforms.
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Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
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Non-interactive SSH password authentication
Instead of using sshpass to non-interactively provide an SSH password, here is a simpler approach by harnessing the built-in features of OpenSSH...
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An illustrated proof of the CAP theorem (2018)
The CAP Theorem is a fundamental theorem in distributed systems that states any distributed system can have at most two of the following three properties.
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PostScript’s sudden death in Sonoma
For the last 39 years, PostScript has been at the heart of the Mac, bringing desktop publishing, fonts, and the LaserWriter and other printers. It has been removed from Sonoma.
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How do Unix pipes work?
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.
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Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
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How a CPU works: Bare metal C on my RISC-V toy CPU
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
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Android Performance Case Study
Measure frame time, allocations, overdraw, and repeated work before changing code; the useful optimization is the one a trace can prove.
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Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some
Published: 10-07-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
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Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes
Digging up some useful and not so popular commands in Linux
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Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
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Using Erlang hot code updates
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.