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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 533 posts.
JSON is important, damn near everything that we do as programmers or operators involves JSON at some point. JSON decoding is expensive, if your product talks JSON then performance of marshalling data in and out of JSON is important. This is a talk about designing an efficient replacement for encoding/json.Decoder .
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…
This post is based on an internal training I prepared for my employer, Locksley, and showcases some source-level techniques for improving C++ compilation times.
This is the story of the time I wrote some code, deployed it to production, and ended up bricking the server it was running on by frying the kernel. Beautiful rendition of me frying the kernel This post is about perils of concurrency and...
Unexpected performance deviations depending on how you spell zero.
Discover how Expensify achieved remarkable scaling: 4M QPS on one server! Dive into optimizing SQLite for impressive performance gains.
This page describes a TCP performance problem resulting from a little-known interaction between Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK. At least, I believe it’s not well known: I haven’t seen it documented elsewhere, yet in the course of my career at Apple I have run into the performance problem it causes over and over…
Decimating Array.Sort with AVX2. I ended up going down the rabbit hole re-implementing array sorting with AVX2 intrinsics. There’s no reason I should go down alone.
How distributed serverless compute changes the game on whats possible
From the very beginning , we built Chrome to be the fastest browser possible. The faster Chrome is, the faster you find the information you ...
Several months ago, I realized that I had a lot of sensitive files on my computer (my diary, if you must know) that I was afraid of losing, but I didn’t feel comfortable putting them in something like Google Drive or Dropbox. Introducing UtahFS.
If you work with Apple in some capacity, you know that they’re not very likely to admit mistakes. I’m not aware of Apple publishing postmortems after outages or providing details about known issues. So it’s up to the developer and admin communities at large to help each other learn about outages and potential causes…
The much anticipated NVIDIA GeForce RTX3080 has been released. How good is it with TensorFlow for machine learning? How about molecular dynamics with NAMD? I've got some preliminary numbers for you!
Debugging, GNU± Linux and WebHosting and ... and ...
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
At Buffer, we’ve been using Kubernetes since 2016. We’ve been managing our k8s (kubernetes) cluster with kops, it has about 60 nodes (on AWS), and runs about 1500 containers. Our transition to a micro-service architecture has been full of trial and errors. Even after a few years running k8s, we are still learning its…
How to accurately measure latency on Linux
This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out ...
An essay that bids farewell to x87 – a computing architecture too long for this world.
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. The SpaceX Starship is a game changer for space exploration. It is intended to be far bigger, cheaper, versatile, and available t…
Initially, I wasn’t sure whether to write about this migration project, but when I randomly asked if people would be interested, the response was overwhelming. This was a long, kind of boring, very repetitive, and at times incredibly frustrating project, but I learned a lot, and maybe someone else will learn from this…
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
