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What Does an Idle CPU Do?
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,936 posts.
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Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia
On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between anothe…
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Improving Firefox stability on Windows by retrying failed memory allocation
Poorly behaving web pages and apps are no longer capable of crashing the browser by exhausting memory, thanks to a simple trick.
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The computers are fast, but you don't know it
The computers are fast but you don't know it: Speeding up your Python functions with Cython & C++
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Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres
Why you should just use Postgres instead of Kafka for small-scale message queuing and pub-sub patterns. Benchmarks and practical tests included.
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QUIC is now RFC 9000
QUIC version 1 is officially formalized, and QUIC deployments will now move away from using temporary draft versions to the newly minted version 1.
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Windows Defender is enough, if you harden it
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. You don’
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Hubris – A small operating system for deeply-embedded computer systems
The release of a small open-source operating system for deeply-embedded computer systems.
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Surprisingly Slow
I have an affinity for performance optimization and making software as efficient as possible. Over the years, I've encountered specific instances and common patterns that make software or computers slow. In this post, I'll shine a spotlight on some of them.
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Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond
Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford, Jeff Watts
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Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint
Posted by Tavis Ormandy.Symantec is a popular vendor in the enterprise security market, their fla...
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SUSE is forking RHEL
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment
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WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
How Pi's minimal harness improves coding-agent cost and performance, with examples from Databricks and Shopify's pi-autoresearch extension.
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How Discord supercharges network disks for extreme low latency
Learn how Discord optimizes its platform to respond to the high frequency of queries for all types of content and data as quickly as possible.
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Things I learned from building a production database
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+…
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SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases
The name SQLite is a nice name, but the "lite" part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases.
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The JVM is not that heavy
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
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Do not change Linux files using Windows apps and tools
Update - May 2019 Windows 10 version 1903 has now been released and allows an important update to WSL that allows Windows applications and tools to access
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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
Earlier this year, I blogged about work I did to improve VRAM management for games. Now, after many months of floating around in mailing lists, the kernel patches are finally merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3! Hooray!