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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Exploring Linux command-line space time
I was curious to explore how long a program takes to run, how much memory is used over time, and what processes/threads are spawned. To provide answers I wrote a tool, which I named st . Here are a few things I looked into.
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Linux boot partitions and how to set them up
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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After 5 days, my OS doesn't crash when I press a key
Day 37: After 5 days, my OS doesn't crash when I press a key
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What we talk about when we talk about system design
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet…
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WASM Is the New CGI
I read a wonderful twitter thead about CGI and the birth of the web and this triggered a thought I've been kicking around. > Wasm is the new CGI And to be cle...
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Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson…
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A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
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Writing a full-text search engine using Bloom filters (2013)
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
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Debugging Emacs, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DTrace (2018)
For some time Elfeed was experiencing a strange, spurious failure. Every so often users were seeing an error (spoiler warning) when updating feeds: “error in process sentinel: Search failed.” If you use Elfeed, you might have even seen this yourself. From the surface it appeared that curl, tasked with the…
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Should you be scared of Unix signals? (2016)
Should you be scared of Unix signals?
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Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
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Debian and firmware
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
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Against /tmp
I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea , which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems.
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How virtualisation came to Apple Silicon Macs
From Hypervisor APIs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, through early VirtIO kernel extensions in Mojave in 2018, and Arm hypervisor support in Big Sur.
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Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board
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What async promised and what it delivered
The async/await saga is a story where each chapter solves the previous chapter's worst problem while introducing new structural costs. The sequential syntax that made async code readable also obscures the thing that matters: which operations actually depend on each other.
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ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark
In my previous blog post, I compared the performance of my new ARM-based MacBook Pro with my 2017 Intel-based MacBook Pro. I used a number parsing benchmark. In some cases, the ARM-based MacBook Pro was nearly twice as fast as the older Intel-based MacBook Pro. I think that the Apple M1 processor is a breakthrough ……
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Disasters I've seen in a microservices world
When Martin Fowler's post about microservices came out in 2014, the teams where I worked were already building service-oriented architectures. That post and the subsequent hype made their way into almost every software team in the world. The "Netflix OSS stack" was the coolest thing back then, allowing engineers…
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It Is Never a Compiler Bug Until It Is
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
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Apps for which macOS applies compatibillity fixes
What do Photoshop, Matlab, Panic Transmit, and Eclipse have in common? They are among the 299 apps for which macOS applies compatibillity fixes.
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Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
How dare you!
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Ubuntu 22.04 LTS servers and phased apt updates
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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So good, it works on barbed wire (2001)
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...