121
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
122
How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
123
Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
124
125
Write libraries instead of services, where possible
For any developer with limited resources, this means a library (where viable) can provide the same functionality to the user, at a lower cost to the developer than a service.
126
127
Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
128
24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
129
130
131
Twenty years of Valgrind
It has been twenty years since Valgrind 1.0 was released.
132
Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
133
134
An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
135
Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
136
/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
137
Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii.
138
Speed of Rust vs. C
The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.
139
PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4
After the daily dose of Hackaday - and with an idea that seemed very doable, and actually, with some improvements can be easily reproducible.
140
A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Imagine you wrote a program for a pleasingly parallel problem, where each thread does its own independent piece of work, and the threads don’t need to coordi...
141
macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
142
143
144
Hard numbers in the Wayland vs. X11 input latency discussion
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
145
Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
146
Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
147
Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler
[Thanks for many comments and votes on Hacker News! ] It’s been two years since I started working as a software engineer. I sometimes tell my colleagues about a student project I did in my junior year of university, and it’s so well-received that I’m writing this post. 1 Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever…
148
149
Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
One of the skills I wish I’d learned earlier in my career is basic Linux server administration. Specifically in relation to hosting something on the web, either a web app or API that I wrote myself, or something from the thriving self-hosted community , such as WordPress. Managing servers is increasingly seen as the…
150
The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …