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Demystifying Debuggers
An introduction to a new post series covering debugger basics.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
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Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
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Isn't WSL2 just a VM?
My take on Windows NT subsystems and the thin line between VMs and subsystems.
304
Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin
In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request…
305
Life of an inference request (vLLM V1): How LLMs are served efficiently at scale
vLLM is an open-source inference engine that serves large language models. We deploy vLLM across GPUs and load open weight models like Llama 4 into it. vLLM sits at the intersection of AI and systems programming, so we thought that diving into its details might interest our readers.
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Under the hood: Vec<T>
Let's look at Vec<T> to get a better understanding of its inner structure.
307
Hypervisor 101 in Rust
This is a day long course to quickly learn the inner working of hypervisors and techniques to write them for high-performance fuzzing.
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From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey
Upgraded to WiFi 7 expecting 1.7 Gbps speeds. Got 400 Mbps instead. Here's what was actually wrong and how I fixed it.
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The Green Tea Garbage Collector
Go 1.25 includes a new experimental garbage collector, Green Tea.
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The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
311
A kernel stack use-after-free: Exploiting Nvidia's GPU Linux drivers
This article details two bugs discovered in the NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules and demonstrates how they can be exploited. The bugs can be triggered by an attacker controlling a local unprivileged process. Their security implications were confirmed via a proof of concept that achieves kernel read and write…
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Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs
The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…
313
Lessons from the PG&E outage
At Waymo, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time—earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, our service…
314
What the hell is a target triple?
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
315
The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…
316
Rustls Server-Side Performance
In past years, the Rustls project has been happy to receive substantial investments from the ISRG. One of our goals has been to improve performance without compromising on safety. We last posted about our performance improvements in October of 2024, and we're back to talk about another round of improvements. What is…
317
The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming
Read THE WEIRD CONCEPT OF BRANCHLESS PROGRAMMING on sanixdk.xyz
318
JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
319
Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
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Erlang ARM32 JIT is born
A modular embedded ecosystem—bare-metal hardware, software stacks, and a cloud platform for real-time IoT and distributed systems.
321
Don't “let it crash”, let it heal
Don't "let it crash". Let it heal.
322
Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
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Absurd Workflows: Durable Execution with Just Postgres
Durable execution with just postgres.
326
What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512
This is part 3 of my ongoing series about LATENTRED, my project to create an open source 1U managed Ethernet switch from scratch.
327
NetBSD on a JavaStation
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
328
Hands-On Graphics Without X11
A crash course on direct framebuffer and keyboard access via NetBSD’s wscons
329
Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…
330
How to Install Windows NT 4 Server on Proxmox
Should I host my blog on here?