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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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…
As the popular saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: caching, off-by-one errors, and getting a Rust job that isn’t cryptocurrency-related. Today, we’ll discuss caching!...
With the recent release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka “Vivid Vervet”, the Ubuntu community has also unveiled an early release of LXD (pronounced “lex-dee”), a new project aimed at revitalizing the use of LXC and LXC-based containers in the face of application container efforts such as Docker and rkt. In this post, I’ll provide…
An step-by-step introduction into ELF files. Learn the structure and format, to understand how binaries and libraries on Linux systems work.
Intro, overview
A Better Model for Day to Day Threading Tasks
The critical rules to keep in mind when designing an event-driven architecture
A journey in building an ARM CPU from scratch in a digital circuit simulator, and running Rust on it to interpret Scheme and serve Web pages.
For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of patches to tcmalloc, Google's super high performance memory allocator. I'm going to post about them soon, but first I thought it would be cool to give some background about what a memory allocator actually does. So, if you've ever wondered what happens when you…
I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times and NetBSD was the best choice for it. Let's look at why its build system helps.
The Go runtime, in addition to providing the usual services of garbage collection, goroutine scheduling, timers, network polling and so forth, contains facilities to enable extra debugging output and even alter the behaviour of the runtime itself.
We write about Windows Internals, Hypervisors, Linux, and Networks.
Running Wayland on Linux in 2021
I am a minimalist, and I tend to always keep it as small as I can, so I try to use all I have in base (if it fits), plus of course some other tools needed.
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
In absolute terms they don’t have much overhead – think sub-microsecond for most uses. Which makes them perfectly acceptable when they’re used sporadically (e.g. only a few times per second).
The design of Datalevin's compact Clojure search engine, its T-Wand algorithm, and the full-text search benchmarks comparing it with Apache Lucene.
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
F.lux is a wonderful tool for helping eye strain. People who stare at computer screens all day (like myself) can experience quite a bit of eye strain due to the harsh lights screens emit. One solution is to wear yellow tinted gamer goggles. I chose the cheaper route, installing software to adjust the color temperature…
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math…
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point copro...
Decommissioned enterprise tesla GPUs are widely available and extremely cheap. In this post, I benchmark tesla GPUs to see if they are useful
