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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
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Git’s database internals II: commit history queries
This post explores Git commit history as a database where ‘git log’ is the query language. Learn about Git’s custom query index – the commit-graph file – and how to make sure it's enabled in your repositories.
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Creating a Bare Bones Bootloader
Upon hearing the word 'bootloader', many people cower in fear. It seems like a scary low-level thing that's very easy to mess up. To dispel some of this fear, I'm going to walk through making a super simple bootloader/OS, assuming only a basic level of familiarity with assembly language and how computers work.
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Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust
Updated: 2023-01-06 About a year ago I was bitten by the PL bug. It started with reading Crafting Interpreters and discovering the wonders hidden under the hood of a compiler. I am also been a big fan of Emacs, and this started to get me interested in how its interpreter works. At the same time, I was reading the Rust…
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Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++, Part 2
Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++ that runs on macOS, Linux and WSL - Part 2
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The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM
Yes, that familiar little PC peripheral. The one that toggles a single keyboard/mouse/display ensemble between two or more connected machines.
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Ways to break your systems code using volatile (2010)
Regarding the example #5, I must be confused about the definition of a sequence point because the resulting assembly output seems to be non-ANSI C:
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The rise of embarrassingly parallel serverless compute
How distributed serverless compute changes the game on whats possible
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The Kobayashi Maru of comparing dates with times
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Jitterdämmerung
So, Windows 10 has just been released, and with it Ahead Of Time (AOT) compilation feature .NET native . Google also just recently introduc...
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“It's done in hardware so it's cheap” (2012)
This is one of these things that look very obvious to me, to the point where it seems not worth discussing. However, I've heard the idea that "hardware magically makes things cheap" from several PhDs over the years. So apparently, if you aren't into hardware, it's not obvious at all.
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Cold restart whole system after total outage
"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.
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JavaScript Array.push is 945x faster than Array.concat
It took six whole seconds to merge 15,000 arrays with an average size of 5 elements with .concat. What the hell is the Javascript's .concat method doing under the hood?
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Chrome just got faster with Profile Guided Optimization
From the very beginning , we built Chrome to be the fastest browser possible. The faster Chrome is, the faster you find the information you ...
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SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
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Message-Oriented Programming (2017)
Managing complexity within an application is one of the key challenges for any software developer. Cleanly reconciling new features with existing architectures is something we strive for.
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Fast CI with MicroVMs
I saw an opportunity to fix self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions. Actuated is now in pilot and aims to solve most if not all of the friction.
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OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a…
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Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
Published: 05-07-2026 20:33 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Comparing Nginx performance in bare metal and virtual environments
We compare NGINX performance in bare-metal and virtualized (hypervisor) environments, finding a small but measurable performance cost for hypervisors. We also find that performance in Kubernetes environments is worse for network-bound but not CPU-bound operations.
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9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, and MNT Reform. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.
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The memory remains: Permanent memory with systemd and a Rust allocator
A Rust object that survives program restart thanks to Rust allocators, systemd's file descriptor store, and syscall memfd_create.
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Optimizing Siri on HomePod in Far‑Field Settings
The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close…
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PostgreSQL Benchmark on FreeBSD, CentOS, Ubuntu Debian and OpenSUSE
In this post, I’m going to show benchmark results of the recently released PostgreSQL 10.1. I’ve benchmarked the DB on these OSes (all are 64-bit):
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How StackOverflow Scales with SQL Server
Bad news: that page is gone. We try to keep our site as accurate and up-to-date as possible so that if you’re reading advice here, you can rely on it. That means from time to time, we decide that a page isn’t a great reference anymore, and the work to update it is beyond what […]