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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust for both data and control planes.
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
Taking a look at MyRocks performance through some benchmark testing.
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…
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications Moritz, Nishihara, Wang et. al.
I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum. I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time. That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed…
Data management decisions don’t have to be costly. Introducing Tiered Storage, a low-cost infinite storage tier for your historical data needs.
This post is part of a larger effort you can view over here: https://osblog.stephenmarz.com .
Etcd is a coordination service designed to offer Strict Serializable reads, writes, and micro-transactions over a small, in-memory key-value store. In 2022, Jepsen re-tested etcd as a part of a private engagement covering an assortment of databases. We reported several issues to the etcd team during that engagement…
The formalism of Hierarchical State Machines (aka statecharts) makes the state machine approach truly applicable to real-life embedded systems. Read more.
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…
In this article we’ll learn how to build shared libraries and install them properly on several platforms. For guidance, we’ll examine the goals and history of dynamic linking on UNIX-based operating systems.
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine . Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final…
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \ \ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb) / -------------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || (Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.) The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a…
On May 1, 2017 Intel disclosed the AMT vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00075), but details of that vulnerability were not made public. However, Tenable researchers were able to overcome this challenge and make Tenable the first to deliver Intel AMT vulnerability detection capabilities to customers, just minutes after Intel’s…
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.
Overview Symlinks, or symbolic links, are “virtual” files or folders which reference a physical file or folder located elsewhere, and are an important feature built in to many operating systems, including Linux and Windows. The Windows’ NTFS file system has supported symlinks since Windows Vista. However, it hasn’t…
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
Fedora Linux 34 is released and ready for you to install or upgrade today.
Scaling is a complex topic, but after working at big tech on services handling millions of requests and scaling my own startup (AlgoMaster.io) from scratch, I’ve realized that most systems evolve through a surprisingly similar set of stages as they grow.
We’re excited to announce that Google will launch Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices in Q2 2026, following the successful expansion of Chrome to Arm-powered macOS devices in…
A short case study breaking down the interesting design aspects of containers.
A map can always grow in memory; it never shrinks. Hence, if it leads to some memory issues, you can try different options.
