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How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Computers as I used to love them
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
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Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go
What is the complete path between visiting thepiratebay and sublimating an mp3 file from thin air? In this post, we'll implement enough of the BitTorrent protocol to download Debian. Look at the [Source code](https://github.com/veggiedefender/torrent-client/) or skip to the [last…
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Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
When complexity leaps are on the table, there’s usually also an opportunity to squeeze some extra juice out of the system you have. By tweaking the workload, tuning performance, or supplement…
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Rust std fs slower than Python? No, it's hardware
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
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Simple Systems Have Less Downtime
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that
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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
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I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
After using Macs for fifteen years, I switched to Linux as my main operating system and I’m enjoying it. Here’s an introduction to Linux that may help you too.
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I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
...so the malware would finally shut up and run
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The world in which IPv6 was a good design
. It took a look longer to read the book than to play this little web game, but you get pretty much the same thing out of the game, so I hig...
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Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
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Why fastDOOM is fast
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
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Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way
Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly , but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about…
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The Unix Magic Poster
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?
I made my next game twice as fast by forking go's crypto library
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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
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Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
So I was uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual. It was going slowly, so I opened up the Trackers tab in qBittorrent and saw the following:
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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
[German]Brief information, which is already here with me since August 2021, but which I have not yet addressed in the blog. David Xanatos has pointed out to me that Microsoft is refusing to sign…
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Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
Rosetta 2 is remarkably fast when compared to other x86-on-ARM emulators. I’ve spent a little time looking at how it works, out of idle curiosity, and found it to be quite unusual, so I figur…
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The Beauty of Unix Pipelines
Some examples of using unix tools in a pipeline
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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
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Why modern software is slow
I apologize for this title because there are many things that can make modern software slow. Blindly applying one explanation without a bit of investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cu…