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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Verilog is the de facto abstraction for programming today’s FPGAs. RTL programming is fine if you want to use FPGAs for their traditional purpose as circuit emulators, but it’s not the right thing for the new view of FPGAs as general-purpose computational accelerators.
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d...
SQLite is fast, really fast. On a single ~40€ / m commodity server, it can sustain ~168,000 reads and ~8000 writes per second, concurrently. Because it's an embedded library designed for client-side applications such as embedded systems and phone & desktop applications, SQLite databases have to be co-located…
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
The choice will not really be Windows or Linux, it will be whether you boot Hyper-V or KVM first, and Windows and Ubuntu stacks will be tuned to run well on the other.
Linked lists are often overused in introductory algorithmics courses, due to a heavy focus on theorical complexities. Unfortunatly, in practice, computers are complex beasts. They don’t execute instructions sequentially 1 with the same cost 2 . This means that a data structure with faster theorical complexities does…
How macOS now has anti-malware scanners checking your Mac automatically many times each day for the most frequent malware.
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
Programming notes for Unreal Engine, Houdini, Game Development, Math, & Graphics
Take manual control of your Linux system’s DNS resolution and keep programs from interfering with and overwriting your resolv.conf file.
In today's article, we're embarking on something unprecedented! We'll guide you step by step through the process of transforming an SSD equipped with QLC NANDs into an SLC SSD, significantly enhancing its durability and overall performance!
malloc has a very nice and simple interface: you ask for a certain amount of memory, and you’re given a void pointer to your block of contiguous bytes that’s been magicked into existence. Once you’re done with it, you call free with the same pointer and the memory disappears into the ether.
They're Mario Bros. for the NES, apparently.
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
Once Upon a Time there was a company called Base7Booking that by the beginning of 2016 it was supporting around 1200 databases on MySQL 5...
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…
Today, we’re going to look at the many ways of implementing user-to-kernel transitions on x86, i.e. system calls. Let’s first quickly review what system calls actually need to accomplish.
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
Lenovo has finally made a smaller version of its X1 Carbon , something I've been looking forward to for years.
Using the flame graph visualization to determine where file system or disk space is consumed, and answer where space has gone.
In my last post I promised to give more details about some rabbit holes that I went down during the investigation, including page tables, locks, WMI, and a vmmap bug. Those details are here, along …
