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0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
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The death of thread per core
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
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A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability
An in-depth exploration of what happens when Rust and C memory allocators collide, featuring crash analysis.
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When root meets immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. log tampering
Rafael Sadowski
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Fundamental flaws of SIMD ISAs (2021)
According to Flynn’s taxonomy SIMD refers to a computer architecture that can process multiple data streams with a single instruction (i.e. “Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams”). There are different taxonomies, and within those several different sub-categories and architectures that classify as “SIMD”.
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I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms
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A million ways to die from a data race in Go
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
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An Update on TinyKVM
Hey all. TinyKVM was open-sourced this february and since then I’ve been working on some things that are very much outside of the scope of…
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Golang's big miss on memory arenas
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
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What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…
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Susctl CVE-2024-54507: A particularly 'sus' sysctl in the XNU kernel
A very sus sysctl in the XNU kernel.
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Acronis True Image costs performance when not used
Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what har…
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Why use OpenBSD?
Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD . This post is an English transcription of the original French slides that are available here .
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Atomics and Concurrency
This is going to be a long post, but I hope you get value out of it. This wasn’t an easy topic to tackle but it was definitely worthwhile!
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Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
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A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
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Reproducing the AWS Outage Race Condition with a Model Checker
Welcome to Waqas' blog
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The current state of TLA⁺ development
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺ tooling! which I…
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The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point copro...
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Ditch your mutex, you deserve better
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
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FreeBSD Suspend/Resume
I have been using FreeBSD on the desktops/laptops since about 20 years now and I have described all that I configured in the FreeBSD Desktop series. About 1 year ago I shared a video on YouTube and…
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Needy Programs
We used to use software; now software started to use us