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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
Preface This is a technical article chronicling one of the most interesting bug hunts I’ve had the pleasure of chasing down. At AdGear Technologies Inc. where I work, ssh is king. We use it for management, monitoring, deployments, log file harvesting, even some event streaming. It’s solid, reliable, has all the…
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
If he had been a programmer, Cardinal Richelieu would have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most expert C programmer in the world, and I wi...
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
In this blog we'll discuss how we manage Cloudflare IP addresses used to retrieve the data from the Internet, how our egress network design has evolved, how we optimized it for best use of available IP space and introduce our soft-anycast technology
Today, we'd like to share some of our recent work on Sherlock that allowed a pretty significant speedup when listing files in directories with a lot of entries. > Unlike our usual announcements, this post is more of a behind-the-scenes...
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
Benjamin Spector* , Jordan Juravsky* , Stuart Sul* , Dylan Lim , Owen Dugan , Simran Arora , Chris Ré
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
Posted by Fermin J. Serna, Staff Security Engineer and Kevin Stadmeyer, Technical Program Manager Have you ever been deep in the mines of ...
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
Most SQL database engines are implemented as a separate server process. Programs that want to access the database communicate with the server using some kind of interprocess communication (typically TCP/IP) to send requests to the server and to receive back results. SQLite does not work this way. With SQLite, the…
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…
How to put a price on the limits of knowledge
In this article, the author explores the concept of containers and how they are essentially chrooted processes. They walk through the process of bu...
How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it!
How I solved the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) in Go nine times, from a simple unoptimised version that takes 1 minute 45 seconds, to an optimised and parallelised version that takes 3.4 seconds.
About four months ago, we launched multi-process Firefox to a small group of Firefox 48 users. Shortly after the carefully measured roll-out, we increased to approximately 50% of our user ...
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
breakdown of the architecture behind Linear's speed: local-first sync, MobX observables, instant first loads, and a keyboard-first design.
TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now…
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
How a failing rsync run led to the discovery of a long-standing bug in the Linux TCP implementation.
Siguza’s Blog
As of today, the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime is now at 1.0! This means that all of us in the Bytecode Alliance agree that it is fully ready to use in production.
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
