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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 168 posts.
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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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What Does an Idle CPU Do?
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
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John Carmack on Inlined Code
The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…
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The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi
I've been using 802.11 on Linux now for over a decade, and to be honest, it's still a pretty sad experience. It works well enough that I mostly don't care... but when I care, and try to dig deeper, it always ends up in the answer “this is just crap”.
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Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sine) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place…
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Call me maybe: Elasticsearch
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
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As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes
Fitting as much Stack Overflow as possible into 4096 bytes
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Intel's "cripple AMD" function (2009)
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
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The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
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I/O Thoughts
This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...
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Go Performance Tales
This entry is cross-posted on the datadog blog . If you want to learn more about Datadog or how we deal with the mountain of data we receive, check it out!
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Facebook's software architecture
I had summarized/discussed a couple papers ( Haystack , Memcache caching ) about Facebook's architecture before. Facebook uses simple arch...
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An immutable operating system
A post by August Lilleaas, published February 02, 2014.
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How to zero a buffer
Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
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Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?
by Robin Harris | Friday, April 25, 2014 | Backup , Cloud computing & storage | 24 comments
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You Got Your Web Browser in my Compiler
I recently discovered that Microsoft’s VC++ compiler loads mshtml.dll – also known as Internet Explorer. The compiler does this whenever the /analyze option (requesting static code analysis) is use…
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Modernizing “less”
I have just spent an all-nighter doing something I didn't expect to do. I've " modernized " less (1). (That link is to the changeset.) ...
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My First Unikernel
I wanted to make a simple REST service for queuing file uploads, deployable as a virtual machine. The traditional way to do this is to download a …
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68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
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PHP 7's new hashtable implementation
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…