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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 271 posts.
ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud Kakivaya et al., EuroSys’18 (If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by fo…
Intro, overview
F.lux is a wonderful tool for helping eye strain. People who stare at computer screens all day (like myself) can experience quite a bit of eye strain due to the harsh lights screens emit. One solution is to wear yellow tinted gamer goggles. I chose the cheaper route, installing software to adjust the color temperature…
Over the past several months, a handful of people had been complaining that Mercurial's test harness was executing much slower on Macs. But this slowdown seemingly wasn't occurring on Linux or Windows. And not every Mac user experienced the slowness!
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
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…
PostgreSQL version 10 brings a much anticipated feature: (Native) Table Partitioning .
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
In part four of this series we looked at some key trade-offs involved with a distributed log implementation and discussed a few lessons learned while building NATS Streaming. In this fifth and final installment, we’ll conclude by outlining the design for a new log-based system that draws from the previous entries in…
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
I recently found myself dealing with TCP load balancing for a project and I've come to think that generic TCP proxies can't be implemented without substantial pain and how it makes TLS terminating proxies a bad idea.
Quote: we DID get a perfectly usable C++ dialect which is also 100% safe against memory corruption and against memory leaks. Another Quote: we can (and often...
DISCLAIMER: If you are in no way familiar or comfortable with the Terminal, this is not for you.
The three levels of software, a framework by Jimmy Koppel: runtime, code, and logic, and why code that never fails can still be wrong.
I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum. I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time. That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed…
I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine . Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final…
A short case study breaking down the interesting design aspects of containers.
Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++ that runs on macOS, Linux and WSL - Part 2
Managing complexity within an application is one of the key challenges for any software developer. Cleanly reconciling new features with existing architectures is something we strive for.
This article gives an overview of the implementation and performance of two recent additions to LocustDB, an extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. The first addition is suppo…
In part two of this series we discussed data replication within the context of a distributed log and how it relates to high availability. Next, we’ll look at what it takes to scale the log such that it can handle non-trivial workloads. Data Scalability A key part of scaling any kind of data-intensive system is the…
