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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 301 posts.

2015
275

Call Me Maybe: Percona XtraDB Cluster

Percona’s CTO Vadim Tkachenko wrote a response to my Galera Snapshot Isolation post last week. I think Tkachenko may have misunderstood some of my results, and I’d like to clear those up now. I’ve ported the MariaDB tests to Percona XtraDB Cluster, and would like to confirm that using exclusive write locks on all…

276

Fedora 23 Beta released

The Fedora 23 Beta is here, right on schedule for our planned October final release! Want to help make Fedora 23 be the best release ever, or just want to get a sneak peek? Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site and give it a whirl: Get Fedora 23 Beta Workstation — a reliable, user-friendly, […]

280

Signalfd is useless

UNIX (well, POSIX) signals are probably one of the worst parts of the UNIX API, and that’s a relatively high bar. A signal can be sent to your program at any point when it’s running, and you have to deal with it somehow. Traditionally, there are three ways …

286

Nginx with dynamic upstreams

I recently made a setup at work where I had a Nginx server facing the user, which would forward requests to a service running behind an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (aka. ELB). That in itself doesn’t sound like a difficult task, you just find the hostname for the ELB and point Nginx at it with a proxy_pass statement like…

289

Service-Disoriented Architecture

“You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.” -Paul Barham The first rule of distributed systems is don’t distribute your system until you have an observable reason to. Teams break this rule on the regular. People have been talking about service-oriented architecture for a long…

293

Project Silk

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on Mason Chang's personal blog. For the past few months, I've been working on Project Silk which improves smoothness across ...

295

To ECC or Not to ECC

On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a

299

Understanding Container Reuse in AWS Lambda

Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda AWS Lambda functions execute in a container (sandbox) that isolates them from other functions and provides the resources, such as memory, specified in the function’s configuration. In this article we discuss how Lambda creates and reuses these sandboxes, and the impact of those policies on the…