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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Proxmox Virtual Environment 9.0 with Debian 13 released
Latest announcements for Proxmox.
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Mastering systemd: Securing and sandboxing applications and services
This series of articles will explore some of my favorite Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 capabilities that are enabled by systemd. Thus, this series assume...
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Using /proc to get a process' current stack trace
Check out how you can use the proc filesystem to retrieve the kernel stack trace of a given process
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Fitting a FORTH in 512 bytes
Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just…
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Writing a Simple Garbage Collector in C (2014)
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
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Digging into a QEMU problem of slow data copying
The work on QEMU and this post was paid for by Determinate Systems, and the post was co-published on the Determinate Systems blog .
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When pigs fly: optimising bytecode interpreters
This is part two in my series of articles about bytecode interpreters, based on a small stack virtual machine which I have nicknamed PM…
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The Maturing of QUIC
QUIC, the new internet transport protocol set to replace TCP, was comprehensively built by tech industry leaders over nearly seven years. Go behind the scenes to see how QUIC evolved from a lofty experiment to a standard set to modernize the internet.
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The Optimizations in Erlang/OTP 27
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
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Erlang 28 on GRiSP Nano using only 16 MB
A modular embedded ecosystem—bare-metal hardware, software stacks, and a cloud platform for real-time IoT and distributed systems.
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How Algolia Reduces Latency
Discover the tech stack used by Algolia. Explore 15 tools across 4 categories.
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I made Zig compute 33M satellite positions in 3 seconds
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec. Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagat...
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You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
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Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud
A thought experiment on the winners, losers and new players in a cloud-driven stock, fx and commodity-trading world
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How Pinterest scaled
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
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Memory access is O(N^[1/3])
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…
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Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
TL;DR: I set up Minikube on an old (2012) MacBook Air and configured it to be able to connect from outside my home network so I would have an always-on Kubernetes cluster at home to experiment with.
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A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi
Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?. After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even…
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Linux kernel security work
Lots of the CVE world seems to focus on “security bugs” but I’ve found that it is not all that well known exactly how the Linux kernel security process works. I gave a talk about this back in 2023 and at other conferences since then, attempting to explain how it works, but I also thought it would be good to explain…
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What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)
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HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
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hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
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Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation
With the recent release of Ubuntu 24.04, we at Snyk Security Labs thought it would be interesting to examine the latest version of this Linux distribution to see if we could find any interesting privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
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How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
I've been playing with the macOS Sierra Golden Master for a few days and ran into the new storage optimization app that is now included in macOS. It lead me to realise that Chrome was using 21GB of SSH space!
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A cryptographically secure bootloader for RISC-V in Rust
A summary of a Codethink sponsored project which implements a cryptographically secure bootloader, written in Rust, for RISC-V.