Topics /

Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

Any year
3181

The Benchmarkpocalypse

There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse.

3185

Why Are Geospatial Databases So Hard to Build?

In 2005, I decided to design my first geospatial database engine. PostGIS was unable to keep up with the modest volumes of sensor data I was working with and while I was new to geospatial data, I had skill designing database engines. It seemed simple enough to get the scale and performance I required. Nothing could…

3191

OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go 2

I used OpenBSD on the original Surface Go back in 2018 and many things worked with the big exception of the internal Atheros WiFi. This meant I had to keep it tethered to a USB-C dock for Ethernet or use a small USB-A WiFi dongle plugged into a less-than-small USB-A-to-USB-C adapter.

3201

Revisiting the DOS Memory Models

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?

3204

Towards fearless SIMD

SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.

3206

Goroutines, Nonblocking I/O, and Memory Usage

I am generally a fan of Go's approach to concurrency: writing code with goroutines is a lot easier than writing traditional nonblocking network servers in a language like C or C++. However, while working on a highly concurrent network proxy I came across an interesting realization about how the Go concurrency model…

3207

Performance Tuning for .NET Core

Some of you may know I've been spending whatever time I can scrounge together grinding away at a new serialization library for .NET. Serializers can be complicated beasts. They have to be reliable, flexible, and fast beyond reproach. I won't convince you that serialization libraries have to be quick — in this post…

3208

Why train when you can optimize?

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…

3210

A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand

Now they’ve gone an done it. An unidentified agency has spread a potent computer virus across all the world’s computers and deleted the binaries for every copy of every software development tool. Even the offline copies — it’s that potent.