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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 271 posts.
(Adapted from a Quora answer .) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 mode.…
This is a follow up to Defining the Web platform post from a year ago. It doesn’t try to answer questions but instead attempts to figure out what are the rig...
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at t…
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
In this short post I’m going to attempt to convince you that current network (Internet) latencies are here to stay, because they are already within a fairly small factor of what is possible u…
Dmesg allows us to grasp what's going on under the hood when the kernel gets bad. Check out how dmesg is able to read kernel logs and show to the user.
One of the lesser known parts of Java is InterruptedException. With its vague-sounding name and non-committal Javadoc, few people are able to figure out what they need to do with it. Since I myself didn’t really grok it, I decided to put together a post explaining how interruption works. If you are looking for a more…
This page has been Tagged As Software This is a truism that lots of people quote, but it can be hard to remember, especially in the heat of battle (as it were). Rather fortunately it came to mind just when needed, as I found something completely unexpected.
**Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine** At the height of the Cold War NATO submariners found themselves confronting a Soviet submarine which not only greatly out-performed their own boats, but which could operate beyond the reach of their weapons… Read More >….
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
You might have read that Mozilla recently switched Windows builds to clang-cl . More recently, those Windows builds have seen both PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) and LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled .
Quote: if you DO want to get performance from changing mallocs, make sure to test them with your own app Another Quote: in our humble opinion, overall winner...
I tried to boot an iOS 12 kernelcache in QEMU: I managed to get as far as IOKit startup before receiving a kernel panic. I learned a lot about how iOS boots up with this project.
Context A few years after I created the Elastic Binary Trees (ebtree) , I started to get some feedback from users who needed to use the...
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
The title may lead you to think that this post is another ranting post about the downside of a “Single Page Application”. It is more about…
Many desktop oriented operating systems try to provide various usability improvements and features, like quite useful Expose or Dashboard in Mac OS X or useless Tiles concept in recent editions of …
Recent incident where Uber car was involved in an accident where a cyclist got killed has sparked many comments and opinions. Many blame…
I am a fond Clojure user, and love to use it for both server-side projects and small command-line tools. I love its expressivity and concision, and I like th...
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…
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
One of the concerns that often comes up when someone creates a new HTTP header is how much “bloat” it will add on the network. This is especially relevant in requests, when a little bit of extra data can introduce a lot of latency when repeated on every request.
The futex (short for "Fast userspace mutex") mechanism was proposed by Linux contributors from IBM in 2002 [1] ; it was integrated into the kernel in late 2003. The main idea is to enable a more efficient way for userspace code to synchronize multiple threads, with minimal kernel involvement.
Update to this story at 20 Feb 2018: I’ve been debugging the problem together with Apple and I feel like we are closing in on a solution. My current guess is that Finder indexing needs a lot more time on High Sierra than on Sierra clients.
