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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 271 posts.
I play World of Warcraft . Being a Linux user requires me to run this in Wine , a Windows API translation layer. While Wine is continuously improving, its performance in Direct3D games still leaves much to be desired.
In the past few years, PostgreSQL has advanced a lot in terms of features, performance, and scalability for many-core systems. However, o...
In this All Things Linguistic post Gretchen and Lauren introduce a model dialogue:
Fast programs are always fast, slow programs are slow even on a most powerful computers. Knowing that fast solution exists makes slow one plain wrong.
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
Chris Lattner, the architect of the Clang/LLVM C compiler explained the effects of the C standard’s “undefined behavior”(UB):
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
ramblings by Adam Perry
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software.
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
🦑 Informal definitions of terms used in concurrency modeling
There is a lot of righteous anger directed toward Intel over CPU bugs that were revealed by Spectre/Meltdown. I agree that things could have been handled better, particularly with regards to transparency and the sharing of information among the relevant user communities that could have worked together to deploy…
I recently did a corporate TLA+ workshop and some people asked what TLA+ specs look like in practice. If you looked at the most common public examples, you’d probably come away thinking that people only used it for critical consensus algorithms. This is a problem for two reasons: first, it makes it harder to learn…
It’s not often I am able to write a patch that not only reduces memory usage, but increases speed as well. Usually I find myself trading memory for speed, so it’s a real treat when I can improve both in one patch. Today I want to talk about the patch I submitted to Ruby in this ticket. It decreases “after boot” memory…
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
Check out how you can use the proc filesystem to retrieve the kernel stack trace of a given process
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…
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
One of my tasks (as GCC maintainer of the inter-procedural optimization framework) is to make sure that it works well with real world progra...
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
