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NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini and making the kernel power failure proof
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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SOCKMAP – TCP splicing of the future
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“What the Hardware Does” Is Not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
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AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
A performance comparison between three different methods of deploying an API on AWS
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Do Not Use Task Manager for Memory Info
Task Manager can be lacking as a memory tracker. Let's cover alternatives to replace it. First, let’s discuss how memory allocations work in Windows.
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.
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Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless
The database is usually the most critical part of a software architecture and managing databases, especially relational ones, has never been easy. For this reason, we created Amazon Aurora Serverless, an auto-scaling version of Amazon Aurora that automatically starts up, shuts down and scales up or down based on your…
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Floating point oddity
Code that shows how floating point arithmetic can go wrong, and how C and C++ can return different results for similar code.
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The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
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What if we could see all concurrency bugs in the debugger?
A paper on debugging non-deterministic concurrency issues interactively.
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Compiler Performance and LLVM
I have always wanted the Cone compiler to be fast. Faster build times make it easier and more pleasant for the programmer to iterate and experiment quickly. Compilers built for speed, such as Turbo Pascal, D and Go, win praise and loyalty. Languages that struggle more with this, like C++ or Rust, get regular…
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Traits of Serverless Architecture
Whenever new technologies emerge, the first priority for a technologist is to understand the implication of adopting it. Serverless architecture is a case in point.
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Io_submit and Linux AIO – An epoll alternative
The Linux AIO is designed for, well, Asynchronous disk IO! They are not network sockets, but is it possible to use Linux AIO API with network sockets? The answer is a strong YES!
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Zabbix, Time Series Data and TimescaleDB
Every monitoring system has to deal with three kinds of performance-related challenges. Firstly, a good monitoring system must receive, process and record incoming data very quickly. Every microsecond counts here. This may not seem obvious from the start but when your system becomes large enough all the tiny fractions…
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Thermal Testing Raspberry Pi 4
Raspberry Pi 4 just got a lot cooler! The last four months of firmware updates have taken over half a watt out of idle power and nearly a watt out of fully loaded power
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How to Understand Systems
Solving problems by identifying underlying systems
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JVM Garbage Collectors Benchmarks Report
The current article describes a series of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Garbage Collectors (GC) micro-benchmarks and their results, using a different set of patterns. For the current issue, I included all Garbage Collectors from AdoptOpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM version 13 (build 13+33) :
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CockroachDB's Consistency Model
CockroachDB's consistency model fits somewhere between serializability and linerarizability. We're proposing a new marketing phrase for CRDB's guarantees: no stale reads.
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Picolibc – Libc for Embedded Systems
I wrote a couple of years ago about the troubles I had finding a good libc for embedded systems , and for the last year or so I've been using something I called 'newlib-nano', which was newlib with the stdio from avrlibc bolted on. That library has worked pretty well, and required very little work to ship.
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How to write a rootkit without really trying
We open-sourced a fault injection tool, KRF, that uses kernel-space syscall interception. You can use it today to find faulty assumptions (and resultant bugs) in your programs. Check it out! This post covers intercepting system calls from within the Linux kernel, via a plain old kernel module. We’ll go through a quick…
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ARM and Intel have different performance characteristics: a case study
In my previous post, I reviewed a new fast random number generator called wyhash. I commented that I expected it to do well on x64 processors (Intel and AMD), but not so well on ARM processors. Let us review again wyhash: uint64_t wyhash64_x; uint64_t wyhash64() { wyhash64_x += 0x60bee2bee120fc15; __uint128_t tmp; tmp…
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Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back
Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back Hellerstein et al., CIDR’19 The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research has come round again. Today’s paper choice is su…
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Exposing the Wayland lie (2018)
Hi, people of the future! Did you know that I wrote a follow-up article to this one, called “Further Thoughts on Wayland”? This original article was written in a more combative tone tha…
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A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
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Playing with a Raspberry Pi 4 64-bit
Lightweight virtualization is a natural fit for low power devices and, so, seeing that the extremely popular Raspberry Pi line got an upgrade, we were very keen on trying the newly released Raspberry Pi 4 model B. Getting the board up and running with a 64bit kernel (and a 64bit userland) proved to be kind of a…