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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
This is the story of the time I wrote some code, deployed it to production, and ended up bricking the server it was running on by frying the kernel. Beautiful rendition of me frying the kernel This post is about perils of concurrency and...
Unexpected performance deviations depending on how you spell zero.
A joyride through the dangers of lock-free programming.
Machine learning systems are stuck in a rut Barham & Isard, HotOS’19 In this paper we argue that systems for numerical computing are stuck in a local basin of performance and programmabil…
It is always interesting to speak with our customers and to learn how the dynamic nature of their business and their applications drives their block storage requirements. These needs change over time, creating the need to modify existing volumes to add capacity or to change performance characteristics. Today’s 24×7…
The world of online video is incredibly complex and dynamic. Yet, our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to…
News and information from Gentoo Linux
Then come along! Let’s make a compiler that goes all the way from source to assembly from scratch—no shortcuts!
Stay informed with the latest updates, trends, and insights on DNS and content filtering. Get useful tips and best practices in network security.
High-performance object storage exists, but the economics make it unusable at scale. FractalBits breaks out of the high-performance trap.
Discover how Expensify achieved remarkable scaling: 4M QPS on one server! Dive into optimizing SQLite for impressive performance gains.
It’s terribly punny/dorky of me, but reading your post it just occurred to me one could start a blog called “Race Condition” about being a person of color and being a computer scientist.
Let's talk about why Snapshot Isolation is not enough for a general purpose concurrency control. Snapshot Isolation has been adap...
This page describes a TCP performance problem resulting from a little-known interaction between Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK. At least, I believe it’s not well known: I haven’t seen it documented elsewhere, yet in the course of my career at Apple I have run into the performance problem it causes over and over…
Decimating Array.Sort with AVX2. I ended up going down the rabbit hole re-implementing array sorting with AVX2 intrinsics. There’s no reason I should go down alone.
Harry Marr — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Co-founded Dependabot, previously at GitHub, Monzo, and GoCardless.
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
Putting FreeBSD’s “power to serve” motto to the test. On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a “503 Service unavailable” error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic “Runtime version: Error” message, and was not able to diagnose the problem…
Similar to the previous post, this post covers my analysis of a benchmark on RISC-V targets. Unlike the previous post, I was able to land a patch to eliminate the performance gap to GCC (for this benchmark)!
By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...
By Jose Fernandez
TL;DR: Some Linux distros and even different kernel versions within a distro have disabled IRQ time accounting. In such case, your monitoring tools will report zero time spent in hardware interrupt handlers (shown as %hi, %irq, hiq, etc). It’s easy to check how your kernel is behaving by looking at /proc/stat and you…
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
