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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
Approaching the world of concurrency, one step at a time.
The vchan protocol is used to stream data between virtual machines on a Xen host without needing any locks. It is largely undocumented. The TLA …
gcvis is a simple way of visualising the operation of the garbage collector within a Go process. Here is a screenshot of it in operation. The rest of this article explores how gcvis works and how to interpret its results.
I really wanted to make this article short … but I failed miserably. At least I tried to organize it well so one may get back to it after ‘some’ reading because its not a short le…
Hamming Codes ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit e…
Last week, the server farm of our LMU Student Council had a major downtime over almost five days. As part of the administrator team there, I’d like to publish this post mortem to share our experiences and lessons learned to avoid situations like this in the future.
Does a new algorithm that improves on Dijkstra'a classic one actually deliver a practical benefit for networking?
Why managing configuration has become so complex and how data configuration languages like CUE offer a path forward.
Can a Kubernetes Pod be created with plain Docker commands? Learn the difference between Containers and Pods by exploring how they are implemented under the hood.
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.
There is an interesting thread on the Go issue tracker about daemonizing processes. Most of the thread is not about daemonizing processes though, but more about why Go has no Fork() function which you can call directly in your code. The first time I read through it I was wondering and saying to myself: “Yeah, why is…
I wanted to explore different ways of communicating between different processes executing on the same machine, and doing so as fast as possible. We're focussing on high speed inter-process communication (IPC), but some of these approaches can be extended across a network. We'll do this exploration in Rust.
The October 2012 Xbox 360 dashboard update moved the dashboard from the nand flash to the hard-drive. Does it make a difference?
Update, February 2019: Two years later the VC++ bug I reported here still exists, even in VS 2019 preview. However Chromium no longer builds with VC++ so I’m reverting the changes where I del…
I recently blogged about why I believe the future of cloud data services is large-scale and multi-tenant, citing, among others, S3. “ Top tier SaaS services like S3 are able to deliver amazing simplicity, reliability, durability, scalability, and low price because their technologies are s
How T2 burstable instances and CPU credits really work, with a worked example of a busy t2.micro running out of credits and grinding to a halt.
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…
One of the most common reasons for opening Activity Monitor is to check the % CPU of processes that might be running out of control. How accurate are those figures, though, and should you believe t…
How wanting more is not always better
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
This week’s paper review is the second in a series on “The Future of the Shell” (Part 1, a paper about possible ways to innovate in the shell is here ). As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These weekly paper reviews can also be delivered weekly to your inbox .
