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My server is a phone now
rooting a CMF Phone 1 to run my personal infrastructure at home.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,936 posts.
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Write Your Own Virtual Machine
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
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Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
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Achieving 100k connections per second with Elixir
In this article, we explain how to scale Elixir to handle 100k connections per second.
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The cost of parsing JSON
The dominant costs of processing JavaScript are download and CPU execution time.
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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Many small queries are efficient in SQLite
200 SQL statements per webpage is excessive for client/server database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server.
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Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation
If your company uses Kubernetes, you are likely expending energy on something that doesn't take you towards your mission.
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How to receive a million packets per second
Last week during a casual conversation I overheard a colleague saying: "The Linux network stack is slow! You can't expect it to do more than 50 thousand packets per second per core!"
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
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Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt. If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1. I reported this issue privately…
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So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
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Hunting for Nginx alias traversals in the wild
Research beyond the obvious
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AWS Fargate – Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure
Containers are a powerful way for developers to develop, package, and deploy their applications. At AWS we have over a hundred thousand active ECS clusters and hundreds of millions of new containers started each week. That’s 400+% customer growth since 2016. Container orchestration solutions, like Amazon Elastic…
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Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X
The experiments conducted from July until November at the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald have achieved higher values for the density and the energy content of the plasma and long discharge times of up to 100 seconds – record results for devices of the…
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Why I love FreeBSD
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
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Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software
An interview where we talk about how we use embedded Rust in our coming car projects.
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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
As of today, I've been using the same Arch Linux installation for ten years on my main computer. I don't have much to say, but I'm writing this because my experience doesn't match the common notion that Arch Linux is unstable. 1
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Ground control to Major Trial
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.
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The most remarkable legacy system I have seen
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a bank sometime back. This could be summarized as an internal AWS lambda equivalent. The offering was complete with full CI, CD, unit te…
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Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation
In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the …
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Flow browser passes the Acid tests
Ekioh's multithreaded, parallel, Flow browser passes all three Acid tests.
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We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)
Or: How JPEG Screenshots Defeated Our Beautiful H.264 WebCodecs Pipeline