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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 377 posts.
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Inside the longest Atlassian outage
Hundreds of companies have no access to JIRA, Confluence and Atlassian Cloud. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage?
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A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
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Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
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A Linux Evening
I love to have Linux as my main OS. For someone who spends most of his time programming, writing HTML, writing LaTeX, and browsing the net, it is nearly a perfect tool. Packages are one "apt install" away. Mounting my website is one sshfs away and with private key authentication I don't even have to type my password…
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Fixing stutters in Papers Please on Linux
Since I switched to Linux some time ago, I had my fair share of problems with running games on Linux. To be fair, most of these were not designed to run on linux, but the awesome Proton and its main project wine make it easy to run most games I am interested in seamlessly. Most of the time when problems arise, games…
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DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland
As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will…
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How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
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Computers as I used to love them
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
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Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
Rosetta 2 is remarkably fast when compared to other x86-on-ARM emulators. I’ve spent a little time looking at how it works, out of idle curiosity, and found it to be quite unusual, so I figur…
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Why modern software is slow
I apologize for this title because there are many things that can make modern software slow. Blindly applying one explanation without a bit of investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cu…
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Twenty years of Valgrind
It has been twenty years since Valgrind 1.0 was released.
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Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
One of the skills I wish I’d learned earlier in my career is basic Linux server administration. Specifically in relation to hosting something on the web, either a web app or API that I wrote myself, or something from the thriving self-hosted community , such as WordPress. Managing servers is increasingly seen as the…
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Resolving an unusual WiFi issue
Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.
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Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically
This is Part 1 of a series of posts. Part 2 is available here: Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically It is well-known that writing a good VM for a dynamic language is never an easy job. High
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Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
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The computers are fast, but you don't know it
The computers are fast but you don't know it: Speeding up your Python functions with Cython & C++
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Windows Defender is enough, if you harden it
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. You don’
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Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation
If your company uses Kubernetes, you are likely expending energy on something that doesn't take you towards your mission.
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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
As of today, I've been using the same Arch Linux installation for ten years on my main computer. I don't have much to say, but I'm writing this because my experience doesn't match the common notion that Arch Linux is unstable. 1
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Making a Go program faster with a one-character change
Harry Marr — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Co-founded Dependabot, previously at GitHub, Monzo, and GoCardless.
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SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
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Make Linux look like Windows 95
Blasphemy? Probably! But still pretty awesome!
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Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux?
In the ELF format there are two ways of providing a hash table of symbols. DT_HASH and DT_GNU_HASH . The first one is part of SYSV generic ABI and is well documented and marked as mandatory. DT_GNU_HASH is a newer, smaller, and faster replacement that is not documented , implemented in a few places (Glibc, GNU ld…
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The $8 Linux Computer
Yes, you read that right... for $8 you can run linux on a RISC-V computer. And not just a stripped down kernel without an MMU. No, t...