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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
Take a tour through hundreds of performance improvements in .NET 10.
A query to find out if Postgres is read heavy or write heavy and tips for optimizing Postgres for both read and write workloads.
Let's first not talk about why this can happen, but deleting /lib, /usr/lib, or some other essential runtime files happens quite a lot (as you can see: here, here, here, and here). In this post, I will only discuss what happens when you delete /lib on Linux and how to recover from that. The easy
It started with a simple thought: four bytes in a hash table bucket look just like an integer. Luckily, this one idea led to a deep dive into bit-twiddling and a 2x performance boost.
We rolled out Go 1.24 and saw a memory regression. Here’s how we dug into system metrics, uncovered a bug in the runtime allocator, and worked with the Go team to help fix it.
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux for home servers? Exploring ZFS, jails, stability, and the reasons behind choosing FreeBSD for a home infrastructure.
Breaking up-to-date Windows 11 BitLocker encryption -- on-device but software-only
Latest announcements for Proxmox.
A modular embedded ecosystem—bare-metal hardware, software stacks, and a cloud platform for real-time IoT and distributed systems.
In computer science, we often compare the efficiency of algorithms by describing their runtime as a function of the size of the input. Sorting is O(n * log(n)), meaning that sorting a list of N items takes an amount of time proportional to the number of items multiplied by its logarithm. Matrix multiplication is…
Clarifying the shebang (#!) mechanism: A step-by-step look using strace and kernel code shows how Linux handles script execution directly, revealing the shell isn't involved initially.
A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today 1 [ 1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here. ] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. 2 [ 2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to…
How one million chessboards works
Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn't have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your…
Postgres 18 brings a significant improvement to read performance via async I/O and I/O worker threads. Here we compare its performance to Postgres 17.
Latest announcements for Proxmox.
I know how to decode UTF-8 using bitmath and some LUTs (see https://github.com/skeeto/branchless-utf8 ), but if I want to to go from a codepoint to UTF-8, is there a way to do it without branches?
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of ...
In distributed systems, there’s a common understanding that it is not possible to guarantee exactly-once delivery of messages. What is possible though is exactly-once processing. By adding a unique …
tl/dr: it can deliver big performance speedups at modest area cost
You log in to a Linux server with a performance issue: what do you check in the first minute?
Recently I’ve been working on a pretty big rust project and to my surprise Icouldn’t get tests to work properly.
Making compilation pipelines fast, starting with the tokenizer
Go Scheduler
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
Bytedance, a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world at massive scale, faced significant challenges in ensuring performance and stability across its data centers. With over a million servers running containerized applications, the company required a networking solution…
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
We’re sharing details about Strobelight, Meta’s profiling orchestrator. Strobelight combines several technologies, many open source, into a single service that helps engineers at Meta improve effic…
