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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 582 posts.

2022
395

Removing characters from strings faster with AVX-512

In software, it is a common problem to want to remove specific characters from a string. To make the problem precise, let us consider the removal of all ASCII control characters and spaces. In practice, it means the removal of all byte values smaller or equal than 32. I covered a related problem before, the … Continue…

403

Hand-optimizing the TCC code generator

I am on a number of different compiler mailing lists. One of those is the mailing list for the Tiny C Compiler . Imagine my surprise when a recent email mentioned our latest series and suggested trying a similar approach to improve the code generator in TCC. I was interested to see if there were any low-hanging fruit…

408

RETRO is fast

When I first read Google’s RETRO paper, I was skeptical. Sure, RETRO models are 25x smaller than the competition, supposedly leading to HUGE savings in training and inference costs. But what about the new trillion token “retrieval database” they added to the architcture? Surely that must add back some computational…

414

How to JIT – An Introduction

When I wrote the introductory article for libjit , I aimed it at programmers who know what JITs are, at least to some extent. I did mention what a JIT is, but only very briefly. The purpose of this article is to provide a better introductory overview of JITing, with code samples that don't rely on any libraries.

419

Text consoles and framebuffer consoles in Linux

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…

420

A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter

This is a collection of information on severe ( SEV-0 or SEV-1 , the most severe incident classifications) incidents at Twitter that were at least partially attributed to cache from the time Twitter started using its current incident tracking JIRA (2012) to date (2022), with one bonus incident from before 2012. Not…