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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 358 posts.
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse , keyboard , terminal and…
Making an external bootable SSD for an M1 Mac has proved tricky. Has this changed in macOS 11.2? If you’ve already got 11.1 running on one, how do you update it to 11.2?
I worked on Rust part-time for several years at Mozilla. During that period I regularly summarized how the compiler’s performance had improved. For example: 2017-11-12 to 2019-07-24.
Father, Founder, and FuturistBuilding bestinterest.app and podcasting for coparents.Learn more about me.
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…
I think that one of the most important things to focus on improving is how fast you can work.
As an ex-pat living in Denmark, I use FaceTime audio a lot. Not only is it simple to use and reliable, but the sound quality is incredible. For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those but if you had a good headset. When
Using my own web server accesslogs and public latency data to get a quantitative answer and why roundtrips are such a pain.
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…
JDK 16 is out, and as usual, each new release comes with a bunch of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. ZGC received 46 enhancements and 25 bug fixes. Here I’ll cover a few of the more interesting enhancements.
When benchmarking software, we often start by measuring the time elapsed. If you are benchmarking data bandwidth or latency, it is the right measure. However, if you are benchmarking computational tasks where you avoid disk and network accesses and where you only access a few pages of memory, then the time elapsed is…
Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin
Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just…
While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…
How I reduced Rust incremental debug build times on macOS from 14 seconds down to 4 seconds.
Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in Windows Task Manager ena…
USENIX LISA2021 Computing Performance: On the Horizon
In our 54th reading group meeting, we were looking for an answer to an important question in the distributed systems community: “What about Raft?” We looked at the “ Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? ” paper to try to find the answer. As always, we had an excellent presentation, this…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. v6.0.0 is out now and makes clustering more robust. It also lays the foundation for more important features. What's new in 6.0? 6.0 multiplexes multiple logical connections between rqlite nodes…
How APFS, the boot volume group, hashes, and Secure Boot all combine to guarantee the integrity of your system, and save you trouble and work.
Audio on Unix is a little zoo, there are so many acronyms for projects and APIs that it's easy to get lost. Let's tackle that issue! Most articles are confusing because they either use audio technical jargon, or because they barely scratch the surface and leave people clueless. A little knowledge can be dangerous.
Simplevisor : SimpleVisor is a simple, portable, Intel VT-x hypervisor with two specific goals: using the least amount of assembly code (10 lines), and having the smallest amount of VMX-related code to support dynamic hyperjacking and unhyperjacking (that is, virtualizing the host state from within the host). It runs…
I want to say a few words about my current adventure. I joined the Fuchsia project at its inception and worked on the daunting task of buil...
