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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
Elixir supports the usual supects of observability. Open Telemetry (OTel), log handlers, capturing metrics. And it does it well. This post will mostly focus on the observability you have on the BEAM that is either incredibly rare to see elsewhere or possibly entirely unique.
LZ4 is an exciting algorithm, but unfortunately there is no good explanation on how it works. This blog post tries to explain it in terms that everybody can understand.
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…
My take on Windows NT subsystems and the thin line between VMs and subsystems.
macOS may alert you when you’re trying to open or run a file, with an alert informing you that malware was detected. But what about in scans?
If you are dealing with text in a computer, you need to know about encodings. Period. Yes, even if you are just sending emails. Even if you are just receiving emails. You don't need to understand every last detail, but you must at least know what this whole "encoding" thing is about. And the good news first: while the…
In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request…
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
Nearly all programs are written to access virtual memory addresses, which the CPU must translate to physical addresses. These translations are usually fast because the mappings are cached in the CPU's Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) . Unfortunately, virtual memory on x86 has used a 4 kiB page size since the 386 was…
It's easy to write a TCP stack that works with most traffic. It's harder to write one that interoperates properly with every strange or buggy device that's out there.
Every week, Macs running High Sierra will check the integrity of their EFI firmware, in a bid to detect tampering by malware.
Most programming languages evolved awkwardly during the transition from ASCII to 16-bit UCS-2 to full Unicode. They contain internationalization features that often aren’t portable or don’t suffice.
Thomas Claiburn's FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof discusses two ...
How big should your queue be, and what should you do when it fills up? Many times, we implement or even deploy a networking system before w...
Theo Julienne is a software & infrastructure engineer.
One of the changes in Apple’s release of iOS6 last week was a surprising new ability to cache POST responses.
In the previous post, we discovered the potential for data loss in RabbitMQ clusters . In this oft-requested installation of the Jepsen series, we’ll look at etcd : a new contender in the CP coordination service arena. We’ll also discuss Consul ’s findings with Jepsen.
In the course of trying to figure out how to smoothly zoom timelines of a billion trace events, I figured out a cool tree structure that I can’t find elsewhere online, which it turned out two of my friends have independently derived after not finding anything on their own searches. It’s a way of implementing an index…
As a Linux sysadmin in the 2010s, it's hard not to have an opinion on systemd. But what I find baffling about it is how divisive it is; nearly everyone (or at least the most vocal crowd) seems to either love it or hate it. When I tell people that systemd was the catalyst for my defection to OpenBSD last year, their…
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
UPDATE: This blog post has been updated based on feedback from Reddit and Hacker News. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id...
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…
Let's look at Vec<T> to get a better understanding of its inner structure.
