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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,388 posts.
Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he…
Fully reproducible builds are important because they bridge the gap between auditable open source and convenient binary artifacts. Technologies like TUF and Binary Transparency provide accountability for what binaries are shipped to users, but that’s of limited utility if there is no way (short of reverse engineering)…
Why BPF and XDP are something you should learn.
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy. Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth…
I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targetin…
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
One of the biggest causes of layout shifts for my clients is late-loading web fonts, let's look at how to optimise them!
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
Tracing the x86 context switch in Linux throughout time
Trying to determine exactly where asynchronous interrupts are delivered on Intel CPUs.
When the JPEG folks were working on image compression, they didn't create a better or faster LZ. Instead they developed new approaches. I se...
TL;DR: Use C99’s designated initializers instead. Because it’s 2019! Edit: This post was discussed on Hacker News, Lobste.rs and /r/c_programming. It has been updated to address some of the concerns raised by commenters. One of the little things that annoy me when reading code is the unnecessary use of memset() to…
Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, ...
Let's first not talk about why this can happen, but deleting /lib, /usr/lib, or some other essential runtime files happens quite a lot (as you can see: here, here, here, and here). In this post, I will only discuss what happens when you delete /lib on Linux and how to recover from that. The easy
Continuing on from our tiny snake game , let's explore more into how binaries work on Unix. Let's figure out how our programs come to obtain their argc and argv parameters.
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
Part of the sales pitch for Rust is that it's "as bare metal as C". 1 Rust can do anything C can do, run anywhere C can run, 2 with code...
Gautham's Blog
It started with a simple thought: four bytes in a hash table bucket look just like an integer. Luckily, this one idea led to a deep dive into bit-twiddling and a 2x performance boost.
After examining the virtual address layout of a process, we turn to the kernel and its mechanisms for managing user memory. Here is gonzo again: Linux processes are implemented in the kernel as insta
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux for home servers? Exploring ZFS, jails, stability, and the reasons behind choosing FreeBSD for a home infrastructure.
True or false? Apple supports macOS for three years. Apple’s security updates are sufficient. New versions of macOS are full of bugs. It’s safer to delay upgrading.
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
