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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 582 posts.
Note 05/01/2025: Hello there, you can find an update version of this article here, with the latest findings, improvements and new tools. This is how a Docker container feels inside a macOS environment: lost at sea, far from the coast. With this article I will try to bring this poor container safely to the coast. TL;DR…
Redpanda is a Kafka -compatible distributed streaming system based around append-only logs. Compared to Kafka, Redpanda aims to offer users lower latencies and reduced operational complexity. It uses the Raft consensus algorithm internally, rather than depending on a separate installation of Zookeeper . Redpanda…
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy. Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth…
One of the biggest causes of layout shifts for my clients is late-loading web fonts, let's look at how to optimise them!
Gautham's Blog
Husky is an unbundled, distributed, schemaless, vectorized column store. Here’s how we built it—and why.
True or false? Apple supports macOS for three years. Apple’s security updates are sufficient. New versions of macOS are full of bugs. It’s safer to delay upgrading.
The work on QEMU and this post was paid for by Determinate Systems, and the post was co-published on the Determinate Systems blog .
Macintosh Application Environment for Unix -- from back in 1994.
curl, along with every other Internet tool with aspirations, supports proxies. A proxy is a (usually known) middle-man in a network operation; instead of going directly to the remote end server, the client goes via a proxy. curl has supported proxies since the day it was born. Which proxy? Applications that do…
How Virtual Machines were used to deploy services. What old problems containers solve and what new problems create. How Kubernetes used containers to recreate Virtual Machines in a better way?
In this post, we run WebPageTest Pro Experiments on several popular websites to see how serving more meaningful HTML will impact their upfront performance.
Everyday, billions of people around the world turn to Chrome to get things done quickly on their devices, whether shopping for a new pair o...
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Two years ago more or less I started my journey in Linux. I was scared at first and I didn’t know where to start from. But then I decided to buy a book - and what a book! - in order to follow a path. Along the way, I integrated the material with up-to-date documentation from kernel.org and source code. In the…
When I first started using Linux in 2006, I remember dreaming of a Linux Console. It wasn't so far fetched, the PlayStation 3 had just been released with OtherOS support which allowed users to install Linux (or BSD). Still, it seemed that a Linux-first console seemed like it would only ever be a dream.
Get root on macOS 13.0.1 with CVE-2022-46689 (macOS equivalent of the Dirty Cow bug), using the testcase extracted from Apple’s XNU source.
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…
Improving software memory safety is a key security objective for engineering teams across the industry. Here we begin a journey into the XNU kernel at the core of iOS and explore the intricate work our engineering teams have done to harden the memory allocator and make our software much more difficult to exploit.
I am lucky in that I have a few side projects which have grown up to become full fledged companies. One of them builds little tools to detect different types of financial crime.
The Microvium JavaScript engine for microcontrollers takes less than 16 kB of ROM and 64 bytes of RAM per VM while idle, making it possibly the smallest JavaScript engine to date with more language features than engines 4x its size
Continuous aggregates are one of Timescale's most popular features, but you can’t fully understand them without some context on Postgres views and materialized.
The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores – Lozi et al. 2016 This is the first in a series of papers from EuroSys 2016. There are three strands here: first of all, there’s some grea…
Back in the old days, I could just type route (or, later, ip route) in my Linux terminal and get an accurate picture of all my routes. This is no longer the case.
What happens when you query Postgres? Data can actually come from many different places like the application cache, buffer cache, and even down into the physical disk cache. This post surveys the data storage and flow of Postgres data.
