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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 263 posts.
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were…
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
[Jan 26, 7:25am]: Google has responded to this article and the plans for throttling: Unfortunately, our current implementation throttles...
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
PS4 downloads have a reputation of being very slow. I did some digging to find out the root cause, and was surprised.
. It took a look longer to read the book than to play this little web game, but you get pretty much the same thing out of the game, so I hig...
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
Siguza’s Blog
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
Introduction post to postmarketOS , a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux with own packages, that can be installed on smartphones. (Not usable for most people yet!)
Is it possible to hit a million requests per second with Python? Probably not until recently.
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
If you have a software background and you want to pick up digital design,then one of the first things you need to learn about early on is the conceptof the c...
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
I’m CC’d on mails when things get slow, but never when things work as expected or are fast…oh well. Like an umpire in baseball, if we are doing our jobs, we are invisible. Subjec…
Overall, Rust is pretty good for performance. Write the most simple, naive stuff, and it will usually run within a factor of two from optimized C/C++ code, without any further performance work on the code. With some investment into optimizations, matching or exceeding C’s speed should be possible in most cases…
