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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
You might have used libvirt , a Linux daemon that provides an abstraction and management layer for virtualization software. This daemon allows you to submit an XML file containing a description of a VM, disk image or network. libvirt is then able to configure, start it and keep it running.
PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.
The first argument of a program’s command line, typically reflecting the program’s name/path and often referred to as argv[0], can in most cases be set to an arbitrary value without affecting the process’ flow. Making the case against argv[0], this post demonstrates how it can be used to deceive security analysts…
The difference in security defaults between Debian and Red Hat.
I have a gripe with the phrase
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
If we have a heuristic to guess some value cheaply, we can remove a data dependency in a tight loop using the branch predictor. This allows the CPU to run more instructions in parallel, increasing performance. If this explanation does not make much sense to you, keep reading to learn about some of the magic making…
The Rust language ecosystem is growing each day, its popularity increasing, and with good reason. It’s the only mainstream language that provides memory and concurrency safety at compile time…
If you're writing C++, there's a good reason (maybe...) as to why you are. And probably, that reason is performance. So often when reading about the language you'll find all sorts of " performance tips and tricks " or " do this instead because it's more efficient ". Sometimes you get a good explanation as to why you…
When writing networked games, the question of UDP vs TCP will eventually come up. Typically you will hear people say things like: “Unless you’re doing action games, you can use TCP̶…
Learn how to deploy Docker Swarm to create a Raspberry Pi cluster then turn it into a serverless super-computer with the OpenFaaS framework for Docker.
Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon's ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
A vision of an OS that recognizes that any user activity and most of the system activities are nothing but queries, which ought to be treated uniformly and implemented efficiently once and for all; database as a file system; A paper submitted to MacHack'95
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardwa…
A deep dive into how Linux manages process memory, page tables, and virtual address spaces
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
macOS is now largely undocumented. It’s time to do the job ourselves: what about an open collaborative project?
