301
Bbtree: Fastest Ordered Map
How bbtree, a drop-in replacement for std's BTreeMap, cuts cache misses, instructions and cache coherence traffic, and how it is kept correct.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
302
Dissecting Apple's Sparse Image Format (ASIF)
At WWDC 2025, Apple announced macOS 26 Tahoe. One of the new features in macOS Tahoe is a new disk image format: ASIF. Designed for use with virtual machines (its documentation lives under the Virtualization framework), ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s…
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Breaking the WAL
I did this from a lawn chair on the Sunshine Coast.
305
Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
306
CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root
The Qualys Threat Research Unit has identified a Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting default installations of Ubuntu Desktop version 24.04 and later. This flaw (CVE-2026-3888)…
307
The lost malloc()
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
308
Surprising economics of load-balanced systems
I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average. In other words, we increase…
309
The Fil-C Optimized Calling Convention
Fil-C achieves memory safety even for programs that behave adversarially. That includes casting function pointers to the wrong signature and then calling them, exporting a function with one signature in one module and then importing it with a different signature in another, or even exporting a symbol as a function in…
310
Elasticsearch was never a database
Elasticsearch is a search engine, not a database. Here's why it falls short as a system of record.
311
My fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml
Building httpz, a high-performance HTTP/1.1 parser with zero heap allocation using OxCaml's unboxed types, local allocations, and mutable local variables.
312
Spinning around: Please don’t – Common problems with spin locks
Embark on a journey about why you should sometimes trust your OS more than yourself.
313
Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler
In the previous article we explored how Go’s memory allocator manages heap memory — grabbing large arenas from the OS, dividing them into spans and size classes, and using a three-level hierarchy (mcache, mcentral, mheap) to make most allocations lock-free. A key detail was that each P (processor) gets its own memory…
314
Frame – Linux X server in Assembly
Philosophy - Sciences - Geekery - Art - Life - Coaching - Fun < Simplify Everything
315
Making 768 servers look like 1
How to make 768 distinct Postgres servers look like 1 to your applications.
316
ReactOS 0.4.16
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
317
OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 Processors
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
318
A primer on GPUs and kernel optimization
The basics of GPUs, profilers, distributed computation, and kernel optimization
319
Systems that no one will test
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
320
GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
The Wasm GC and exceptions proposals are both enabled by default in today’sWasmtime 47 release! We are excited to help bring more languages to WebAssemblyand everywhere that Wasmtime runs. Getting to this point involved large Wasmtimecha...
321
Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack
A fake-interview scam tried to backdoor my machine with PinpinRAT, hidden in a malicious TypeScript patch. Analysis of the attack, payload, and indicators of compromise.
322
Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)
My brother and I spent a lot of time designing our eBPF security agent to be really fast from the ground up, but recently we discovered we could make it much faster using memoization! A couple of weeks ago, I profiled the eBPF code and found that the most expensive part of the protection isn’t actually enforcing a…
323
Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)
tar.gz files seem to include extra files starting with ._. When these are extracted on Linux, a bunch of errors are displayed.
324
Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time
Postgres 19 brings native temporal table support. Shaun Thomas covers WITHOUT OVERLAPS, FOR PORTION OF, and temporal foreign keys - and what's still missing.
325
FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/14 branch.
326
Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
327
So, you want to chunk really fast?
How we built memchunk - a blazing fast text chunking library using SIMD and memchr for RAG pipelines
328
Win16 Memory Management
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
329
NetBSD 9.5 released and EOL for NetBSD-9
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.5, the fifth (and final) release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.
330
Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System (2025)
From paged attention, continuous batching, prefix caching, specdec, etc. to multi-GPU, multi-node dynamic serving at scale.