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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Fixing a Buffer Overflow in Unix v4 Like It's 1973
This blog post shows how to fix a buffer overflow in the su progam of UNIX v4
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Optimizing the Ion compiler back end
In September, machine learning engineers at Mozilla filed a bug report indicating that Firefox was consuming excessive memory and CPU resources while running Microsoft’s ONNX Runtime (a machine learning library) compiled to WebAssembly.
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Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
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Postgres performance analysis resulted in a 10x improvement in CPU use
Heap is the only digital insights platform that shows everything users do on your site, revealing the "unknown unknowns" that stay invisible with other tools. Learn about how we improved our performance and saved millions!
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Programming the Linux Framebuffer
Previously , I installed Linux on a small ARM Chromebook and set it up without X.Org, using only the console. After neglecting that machine for quite some time, I came back to it because I wanted to try some pixel-graphics programming and the framebuffer seemed like it might be an easy target.
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Time Traveling Linux Bug Reporting: Coming in Julia 1.5
Julia 1.5 is gaining a cool new bug reporting capability, leveraging mozilla's rr project to automatically create fully-reproducible bug reports
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Intro to kernel debugging
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Making my first embedded Linux system
End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.
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Twitter bug causes self-DDoS, related to Musk’s emergency blocks, rate limits
An "amateur hour" Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measures" to stop web scraping.
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Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
Microsoft is increasingly standardizing on its in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution. Is this Microsoft Linux?
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Netflix: 30% bitrate saving using Film Grain Synthesis
Searchable archive of articles, posts and press on video denoising, per-shot encoding, AV1 film grain synthesis, MXL and broadcast AI.
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Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
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System memory allocator free operation zeroes out deallocated blocks in iOS 16
The system memory allocator free operation zeroes out all deallocated blocks in iOS 16.1 beta or later. Invalid accesses to free memory might result in new crashes or corruption, including NULL -pointer dereferences and non-zero memory being returned from calloc .
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Ventura Issues
I’m more surprised by the nature of many of these issues, by how ridiculous they are compared with the sheer age and supposed maturity of a 20+ year-old operating system.
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Improving cursor rendering on Wayland
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
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How many x86 instructions are there?
It’s surprisingly hard to give a good answer (the question was raised in this article). It depends on how you count, and the details are interesting (to me anyway). To not leave you hanging: …
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A production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
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Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Protocol Firehose by >99%
Jetstream is a streaming service that consumes an AT Proto Sync Firehose and converts it into lightweight, filterable, friendly JSON, allowing us to live tail all posts on Bluesky for as little as ~850 MB/day
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A lock-free, concurrent, generic queue in 32 bits
While considering concurrent queue design I came up with a generic, lock-free queue that fits in a 32-bit integer. The queue is “generic” in that a single implementation supports elements of any arbitrary type, despite an implementation in C. It’s lock-free in that there is guaranteed system-wide progress. It can…
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Linux ext2 filesystem driver now marked as deprecated
31 years after the start of its career in 1993, it’s time for ext2 to retire. Here we are talking about the driver for this filesystem, not exactly the filesystem itself. Continue reading to understand the subtle difference.
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Kernel RCE in iOS/macOS with ICMP
Today, GitHub code scanning has all of LGTM.com’s key features—and more! The time has therefore come to announce the plan for the gradual deprecation of LGTM.com.
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Leave your OS at home: the rise of library operating systems
The efficiency of Operating Systems (OSes) has always been in the spotlight of systems researchers, ever since the seminal Dijkstra’s THE multiprogramming system in early 60s. But the reason …
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Deleting multiplayer from the Unreal engine can save memory
Although the title of this article might suggest otherwise, I don’t dislike Unreal’s multiplayer features. As someone who has worked on two different multiplayer games in Unreal, I enjo…
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MMU gang wars: the TLB drive-by shootdown
T The problem Every once in a while I get involuntarily dragged into heat...