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Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
It's time to put my water cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster to the test. I put it up against my MacBook and a Windows PC to see which performed best
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
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What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
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Beringei: A high-performance time series storage engine
Visit the post for more.
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Benchmark in Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
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Windows dynamic linking depends on the active code page
Windows paths have been WTF-16 -encoded for decades, but module names in the import tables of Portable Executable are octets. If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec — then the dynamic linker must somehow decode those octets into Unicode in order to construct a lookup path. There are multiple…
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Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
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Algorithmic complexity attacks and libc qsort()
An algorithmic complexity attack is a denial of service attack that triggers worst case behaviour in code that is otherwise expected to perform well. The canonical example would be the widely published attacks against hash table implementations , where carefully crafted inputs made snappy \(O(1)\) operations…
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The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own
While investigating the aftermath of a potential security breach, I came across a somewhat "odd" process looking like this:
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Lessons Learned from Scaling to Multi-Terabyte Datasets
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of the…
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Just fixed a 20-year-old bug…
Read Java blog posts to learn how to save on license fees, get better performance, use more secure Java, and optimize cloud costs.
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Inside the Linux boot process (2006)
The open source operating system that runs the world.
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We upgraded an old, 3PB large, Elasticsearch cluster without downtime
Back in 2018, now five years ago, we published a blog post describing our 400+ node Elasticsearch cluster. In that post we brought up an important topic: So far, we have elected to not upgrade the cluster. We would like to, but so far there have been more urgent tasks. How we actually perform the upgrade is undecided…
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Congestion Control Arrives in Tor 0.4.7-stable
Tor has released 0.4.7.7, the first stable Tor release with support for congestion control. Congestion control will result in significant performance improvements in Tor, once Exit relays upgrade. Relay operators: please read!
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Full Reverse Engineering of the TI-84 Plus Operating System
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
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Building the DOM faster: speculative parsing, async, defer and preload
In 2017, the toolbox for making sure your web page loads fast includes everything from minification and asset optimization to caching, CDNs, code splitting and tree shaking. Understanding what goes ...
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Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's approach to emulation, simulation, and tiny versions of big things.
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I hope distributed is not the new default
I miss people. :-(
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Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)
Note: This is a position piece, not a technical article. Hat tip to Jake Skelcy for requesting such a piece. Computers didn’t always have operating …
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The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
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OpenMandriva, the first Clang-built Linux distribution
OpenMandriva Lx is a unique and independent distribution and direct descendant of Mandriva Linux
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WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
OpenSSL sucks. The BoringSSL and AWS-LC forks are Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases. I can't remember ever having a good experience with software using GnuTLS. LibreSSL is incomplete... FOREWARD This post is about the experience of taking a leap of …
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta
Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain and too many other technical breakthroughs to list all share a common component - Linux, the same workhorse that has driven mission-critical, production systems for nearly two decades. Today, we’re offering a vision of a Linux foundation to power the…
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What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…