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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 271 posts.
The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012 I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked…
Monday’s /r/dailyprogrammer challenge was to write a program to read a recurrence relation definition and, through interpretation, iterate it to some number of terms. It’s given an initial term ( u(0) ) and a sequence of operations, f , to apply to the previous term ( u(n + 1) = f(u(n)) ) to compute the next term…
I have been doing a lot of competitive programming problems on Kattis lately. It is my favourite online judge, and I have been enjoying my climb up the Irish scoreboard in an attempt to regain my former glory of first place. In particular, today I was tackling the problem Pivot.
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
There is a lot to say about parallelism in PostgreSQL. We have come a long way since I wrote my first post on this topic ( Parallel Sequen...
One like, one unpopular opinion is one of them top Twitter games, innit?
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
Parallel sequential scan is the first parallel access method in PostgreSQL and is introduced in version 9.6. The committer of this featu...
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
You’ve implemented some of your performance critical code using the new platform intrinsics API. The code is now running 10x or even 100x faster than before, and you might think that it can’t get any faster. This post will show you some less obvious (but almost universally applicable) techniques for improving the…
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
and determined that most programs reference /etc/resolv.conf along the way to figuring out which DNS server to look up.
Some new proposed protocols will encrypt the transport layer headers. Encryption is good, so more encryption must be better, right? Unfortunately there's going to be a huge hidden cost that'll be paid by anyone troubleshooting networking problems.
Last time , we started making a debugger and live editor for (re)creating assembly and C programs.
We need programming, but do we need the program?
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one.
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…
Recent switch of official Firefox builds to Clang on all platforms has triggered some questions about the quality of code produced by GCC c...
I build and maintain smf - the fastest RPC in the west.The main language supported is C++. We use Seastar asthe actual asynchronous framework.
In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
