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Things I Hate About PostgreSQL (2013)
PostgreSQL Talk
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Which is better on Android: divide by 2 or shift by 1?
I've been porting the AndroidX collection library to Kotlin multiplatform to experiment with binary compatibility, performance, tooling, and the different memory models. Some of the data structures in the library use array-based binary trees to store elements. The Java code has a lot of shifts to replace power-of-two…
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Finally fixed my PC’s persistent graphics and audio stutters
I experienced intermittent stuttering when my PC ran Linux and Windows. A mix of hardware, firmware, and driver issues created a difficult to diagnose problem.
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How Amazon uses chaos engineering to handle 80k requests per second
Discover how Amazon Search combines technology and culture to empower its builder teams, ensuring platform resilience through Chaos Engineering.
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Unlocking LUKS2 Volumes with TPM2, FIDO2, PKCS#11 Security HW on Systemd 248
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (1999)
As a rule, "sophisticated" progrmming is pretty boring - optimizing the unnecessary to speed up the uninteresting. Here, however, is an incredibly sophisticated package intended for fun and games. The more you know about software, the more astounded you will become as you read this.
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A Foolish Consistency: Consul at Fly.io
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
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Finding Kafka’s throughput limit in Dropbox infrastructure
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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Effective Concurrency with Algebraic Effects in Multicore OCaml
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
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How to escape the Linux networking stack
Many products at Cloudflare aren’t possible without pushing the limits of network hardware and software to deliver improved performance, increased efficiency, or novel capabilities such as soft-unicast, our method for sharing IP subnets across data centers. Happily, most people do not need to know the intricacies of…
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A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat (2009)
This is the second post in the article series about Unix utilities that you should know about. In this post I will introduce you to the netcat tool or simply nc. Netcat is often referred to as a Swiss Army knife utility, and for a good reason. Just like the multi-function usefulness of the venerable Swiss Army…
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The Two Faces of AMP
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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Query Engines: Push vs. Pull
People talk a lot about “pull” vs. “push” based query engines, and it’s pretty obvious what that means colloquially, but some of the details can be a bit hard to figure out.
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Evolution of the ELF object file format
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…
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Validating UTF-8 bytes using only 0.45 cycles per byte (AVX edition)
When receiving bytes from the network, we often assume that they are unicode strings, encoded using something called UTF-8. Sadly, not all streams of bytes are valid UTF-8. So we need to check the strings. It is probably a good idea to optimize this problem as much as possible. In earlier work, we showed that ……
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I rewrote Firefox's BMP decoder
Recently I’ve been deliberately working on some areas of Firefox I’m unfamiliar with, particular relating to graphics. This led me to rewriting Firefox’s BMP decoder and learn a number of interesting things along the way.
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The mystery of the fifteen-millisecond breakpoint instruction
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
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Faster, cheaper, and better: A story of breaking a monolith
On May 21st 2019, we broke search service out of vehicle-service. It was faster, cheaper, and better!
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Susctl CVE-2024-54507: A particularly 'sus' sysctl in the XNU kernel
A very sus sysctl in the XNU kernel.
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Alice is impatient
Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s.
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Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-Pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs
I’m pleased to report that Hyperscan, the regular expression matcher that ate my life from 2008 through 2018, finally has a paper (pdf) – it’s being presented this week at NSDI &#…
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You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles
Git packfiles were designed for mmap and local disk, so pulling one object out of a bucket means guessing at a byte range. I wrote a new format instead.