181
How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
182
Hardware hotplug events on Linux, the gory details
Maybe the code shouldn't be the only documentation?
183
State of multi-player Wayland
I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!
184
An ode to bzip
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
185
OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break
We made a YouTube video showing how NonBioS can deploy OpenClaw on a fresh Linux VM automatically - zero human intervention, about 7 minutes start to finish.
186
Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
GOG is great. I bought a few old games from them: SimCity 2000, Theme Hospital, Syndicate Plus. And by old games, I mean games from my childhood that still
187
A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
188
CPU Counters on Apple Silicon: article + tool
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…
189
JIT Compiling Code in 5μs
Build a copy-and-patch JIT compiler in Rust, generate ARM64 machine code, and benchmark it against an interpreter and handwritten implementation.
190
Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat
std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig's new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring just use threads impl. I personally find it neat though --- it does this weird thing that I wanted to do for ages, that to my knowledge no one else is doing properly, and implements it better than I…
191
How Is Data Stored?
Invariably, it involves trying to trap electrons in increasingly complicated ways.
192
Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
193
How Fast Does Claude, Acting as a User Space IP Stack, Respond to Pings?
Here is a fun thought: if we ask Claude Code to act as a user space IP stack, how quickly will it be able to respond to a ping?
194
Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
195
Dissecting Apple's Sparse Image Format (ASIF)
At WWDC 2025, Apple announced macOS 26 Tahoe. One of the new features in macOS Tahoe is a new disk image format: ASIF. Designed for use with virtual machines (its documentation lives under the Virtualization framework), ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s…
196
Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
197
The lost malloc()
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
198
A primer on GPUs and kernel optimization
The basics of GPUs, profilers, distributed computation, and kernel optimization
199
Surprising economics of load-balanced systems
I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average. In other words, we increase…
200
My fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml
Building httpz, a high-performance HTTP/1.1 parser with zero heap allocation using OxCaml's unboxed types, local allocations, and mutable local variables.
201
Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler
In the previous article we explored how Go’s memory allocator manages heap memory — grabbing large arenas from the OS, dividing them into spans and size classes, and using a three-level hierarchy (mcache, mcentral, mheap) to make most allocations lock-free. A key detail was that each P (processor) gets its own memory…
202
Frame – Linux X server in Assembly
Philosophy - Sciences - Geekery - Art - Life - Coaching - Fun < Simplify Everything
203
OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 Processors
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
204
Systems that no one will test
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
205
Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack
A fake-interview scam tried to backdoor my machine with PinpinRAT, hidden in a malicious TypeScript patch. Analysis of the attack, payload, and indicators of compromise.
206
Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)
My brother and I spent a lot of time designing our eBPF security agent to be really fast from the ground up, but recently we discovered we could make it much faster using memoization! A couple of weeks ago, I profiled the eBPF code and found that the most expensive part of the protection isn’t actually enforcing a…
207
Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)
tar.gz files seem to include extra files starting with ._. When these are extracted on Linux, a bunch of errors are displayed.
208
So, you want to chunk really fast?
How we built memchunk - a blazing fast text chunking library using SIMD and memchr for RAG pipelines
209
Win16 Memory Management
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
210
Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System (2025)
From paged attention, continuous batching, prefix caching, specdec, etc. to multi-GPU, multi-node dynamic serving at scale.