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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.
Intro - Testing Google Sites and Google Caja In March 2018, I reported an XSS in Google Caja, a tool to securely embed arbitrary html/javascript in a webpage. In May 2018, after the XSS was fixed, I r
Linux tracing systems & how they fit together
A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.
A laundry list of speed limits that your code can’t exceed.
I initially wrote this post for myself, I wanted to understand enough about the underlying physical storage to be able to grasp other concepts which can affect your database. This post is probably more aimed to people with similar interests, I will try to keep it accurate but the aim is to make it simpler to…
Here is a Go function, if_max(). It finds the max value of an array of integers. Simple enough:
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…
This is an excerpt from an internal document David Mackey and I co-authored in April 2019. The document is excerpted since much of the original doc was about comparing possible approaches to increasing efficency at Twitter, which is mostly information that's meaningless outside of Twitter without a large amount of…
Lately I’m writing lots of Rust , and I’m particularly interested in systems programming on unix. I’ve been using and contributing to a library called nix 1 , whose mission is to provide ‘Rust friendly bindings to *nix APIs’.
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Grace is overrated
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
It'll bite you some day
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its…
