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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
Decommissioned enterprise tesla GPUs are widely available and extremely cheap. In this post, I benchmark tesla GPUs to see if they are useful
Behold: the Guru of GNU ! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) True enlightment only comes from a truly free computi...
Why two identical VMs on the same host can perform 20% differently — and what NUMA topology in Xen-based virtualization actually costs you.
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
Compute is the brain of the Waymo Driver, translating raw sensor data into real-time driving commands. Operating demonstrably safe, physical AI on the road demands a fundamental shift towards a system engineered for deterministic, low-latency performance. Over the past decade, we have co-designed our hardware…
Roku provides the simplest way to stream entertainment to your TV. On your terms. With thousands of available channels to choose from.
Could we get more cache space with the same hardware? We prototyped compression inside Cloudflare's cache to find out.
If you used PCs in the 90s, you probably remember the 'Intel Inside MMX' stickers. This article explores Intel's major attempt at bringing SIMD instructions to mainstream desktop CPUs.
Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.
The optimizations behind Wasmi 2.0, and how they compare to Wasm3 and Stitch.
In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a working implementation of basic graph algorithms, such as WCC, PageRank and MSSP. For example, I can identify weakly…
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
In a previous post SIMD Matters I discussed the big wins I got from graph coloring to make the contact solver faster. That same approach exists in Box3D. I like to call this approach “wide SIMD”. The idea is to process multiple work units at the same time. In the contact solver this means solving four contact points…
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
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Unified code base. Upstream first. No fork. SoC agnostic. Learn how you can build with Qualcomm Linux 2.0
Most linux software just work on FreeBSD
Back in November last year, I started a new job at Intercom, and one of the first projects I got to work on was improving the Intercom monolith CI with some of my new colleagues.
A real VLC video filter, ported line by line to C# and raced against the original C inside VLC 4, then optimized on both sides, with byte-identical output throughout.
a static http server in aarch64 assembly
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
Scaling is a complex topic, but after working at big tech on services handling millions of requests and scaling my own startup (AlgoMaster.io) from scratch, I’ve realized that most systems evolve through a surprisingly similar set of stages as they grow.
We’re excited to announce that Google will launch Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices in Q2 2026, following the successful expansion of Chrome to Arm-powered macOS devices in…
News and information from Gentoo Linux
Similar to the previous post, this post covers my analysis of a benchmark on RISC-V targets. Unlike the previous post, I was able to land a patch to eliminate the performance gap to GCC (for this benchmark)!
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...
