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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
242
300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's total blocking time
How two simple steps improved the responsiveness of Wikipedia's mobile site
243
The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't
Preface This is a technical article chronicling one of the most interesting bug hunts I’ve had the pleasure of chasing down. At AdGear Technologies Inc. where I work, ssh is king. We use it for management, monitoring, deployments, log file harvesting, even some event streaming. It’s solid, reliable, has all the…
244
Everything in C is undefined behavior
If he had been a programmer, Cardinal Richelieu would have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most expert C programmer in the world, and I wi...
245
DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
246
Boring tech is mature, not old
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
247
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
248
Windows on Btrfs
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
249
Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
250
There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
251
O(n^2), again, now in Windows Management Instrumentation
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…
252
The most expensive number in engineering
How to put a price on the limits of knowledge
253
How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)
How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it!
254
The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions
How I solved the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) in Go nine times, from a simple unoptimised version that takes 1 minute 45 seconds, to an optimised and parallelised version that takes 3.4 seconds.
255
Debugging an evil Go runtime bug
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
256
How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
breakdown of the architecture behind Linear's speed: local-first sync, MobX observables, instant first loads, and a keyboard-first design.
257
Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/S IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation
TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now…
258
Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
259
IOHIDeous OS X Local Kernel Vulnerability
Siguza’s Blog
260
Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
261
Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers
How difficult could it really be?
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How fast is N tokens per second really?
Every local-LLM benchmark reports throughput: "47 tok/s on an M3," "180 tok/s on a 4090," "500 tok/s on Groq." Unless you've actually watched tokens stream at those rates, the numbers are hard to internalize. This is the rendering.
264
3,200% CPU Utilization
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
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SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
267
UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
268
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…
269
The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
270
Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
A deep dive into Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel architecture, tracing its evolution from Mach and BSD roots to powering macOS, iOS, and Apple Silicon. This post explores the hybrid kernel’s design, its adaptation to new hardware and security paradigms, and why XNU remains a uniquely resilient and scalable foundation…