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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
Many folders have them. They’re so invisible that you can’t even see them when you show hidden files. And the only way you know they’re there is when they cause problems.
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
Users spend a large proportion of their online time on mobile devices, and a significant fraction of the rest is users on untethered laptop computers.
Anthony Starks has remixed my original Google Present based slides using his fantastic Deck presentation tool. You can check out his remix over on his blog, mindchunk.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/remixing-with-deck .
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them. Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream …
Terraform state is a distributed systems problem masquerading as file storage. Graph state fixes the bottlenecks.
Today, I am announcing mach/glfw: Ziggified GLFW bindings with 100% API coverage, zero-fuss installation, cross compilation, and more.
In this post I explore the Amazon ECS architecture and what this architecture enables.
(This is the first of a series of technical posts I intend to write, and my goal is to help other engineers learn from the experience of…
Oh look what you just made there.
Tutorial on how to make a stack trace or backtrace manually unwinding the stack using ELF’s .eh_frame and call frame information (CFI)
ZFS has been making headlines lately, so it seems like the right time to talk about the longstanding relationship between FreeBSD and ZFS. ...
Sometimes you need info about hardware, and you probably lost your invoice, spec list or a password to a store website. Maybe you did an upgrade and this info isn't accurate anymore. It's an easy case for home users, but what to do is you have many machines
I have a super power. I want to share it in this blog post so that you, my dear reader, also have it!
This blog post outlines how CockroachDB executes queries and shares Cockroach Labs' vision for future work on distributed processing.
Understanding & mitigating randomly slow writes in PostgreSQL
As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for …
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
tl;dr: You can perform non-blocking multi-object atomic reads and writes across arbitrary data partitions via some simple multi-versioning and by storing metadata regarding related items.
Apache Spark is generating quite some buzz right now. Databricks, the company founded to support Spark raised $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, Cloudera has decided to fully support Spark, and others chime in that it's the next big thing. So I thought it's high time I took a look to get an understanding what the whole…
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/12 branch.
[Updated on 2023-01-24: add a small section on Distillation.] Large transformer models are mainstream nowadays, creating SoTA results for a variety of tasks. They are powerful but very expensive to train and use. The extremely high inference cost, in both time and memory, is a big bottleneck for adopting a powerful…
