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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
I've spent most of my career working inside the JVM, with a sidebar of Python. So the first time I hit incompatible libc with containerized Bifrost, and GPT suggested musl as the solution, not only did I jump on it, I moved my other Rust projects to musl as
The personal blog of Pig Fang.
Update (28th of September 2026) Max Desiatov told me that the @c swift attribute should work, instead of declaring the functions using @_cdecl. The @c attribute marks a global function as a C function implemented in Swift, which formalizes the @_cdecl attribute. A link to the proposal is available here. I did update…
ABSTRACT In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of…
One little step toward UNIX
Root election, port roles, proposals and agreements, topology changes: explore RSTP through simulations powered by MSTPD compiled to WebAssembly.
I've recently tasted AMD Zen 5 CPUs (AWS' m8a instances) and... Whooaaa. Even before talking about GPUs and NPUs, the next 5 years of CPUs will be very exciting! For
2026 legacy lab summer camp plan
Learn what a unikernel is and how it compares to a Linux container. Build and run your first unikernel inside a playground box.
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
While I’m taking a short break from low-level programming, here’s a story by a friend of mine, Sonya, about debugging a seemingly impossible bug in ARM code. This bug hunting saga started several months ago. While developing a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS, I hit a strange bug: if I enabled the…
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT performs surprisingly poorly. We explain why and how we mitigated it.
If you don’t want any of their services, you can turn Siri off in its settings, and disable indexing and search in Spotlight settings. Or you can use mdutil, if you know its limitations.
A single-producer single-consumer (SPSC) queue is a great example of how far constraints can take a design. In this post, you will learn how to implement a ring …
The cost of thread context switch, including cache invalidation, can reach up to 3 million CPU cycles RTTI can be quite expensive, with dynamic_cast being up...
WASI P3 is almost here, bringing native async support to the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) and Component Model. In this post, we’re looking to the next big milestone: a stable, formally specified Component Model 1.0.At February’s B...
When a critical Linux kernel privilege escalation was publicly disclosed, Cloudflare's security and engineering teams detected, investigated, and mitigated the threat across our global fleet, confirming zero customer impact and no malicious exploitation.
My thoughts on why enterprise knowledge systems have failed for sixty years, and what might finally replace them. A couple of weeks ago I demoed one part of what I have been building to a senior exec at a global enterprise - someone who had been asked to lead and guide
We ran a massive, sharded Postgres database at 118.5 million queries per second, with 200k queries per second on each shard across 512 shards.
Do you feel spoiled by modern hardware? I know I do. Even the cheapest CPUs have at least 4 cores nowadays, running billions of operations per second. The idea that you could run any software on le…
A guide to bringing up the Linux Kernel and a userspace application on a new hardware (or in this case, a self-made emulator)
I've been moving my home storage over to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8 as part of a larger ...
Data-only attacks, those that do not affect a program’s control flow, have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat. With our research, however, we have built a tool that automatically generates them with surprising ease. We explain how such attacks work, and why our tool, Einstein…
Fun things to do with big computers
I wanted to know if WebAssembly runtimes are getting faster.
Secure Boot protects a system from an attacker that compromises the boot flow. For example, without Secure Boot it is easy to replace the code that reads your disk encryption password and store it somewhere where the attacker can pick it up later. So ideally you want Secure Boot to be enabled to limit the code that…
