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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 555 posts.
TL;DR This doesn’t mean that the scheduler can’t use more than 8 cores. The scheduler controls how to allocate tasks to available cores. How to schedule particular workloads efficiently…
In this blog, we discuss continuous batching, a critical systems-level optimization that improves both throughput and latency under load for LLMs.
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
How Rust compiles to assembly: enum memory layout, smart pointers, static vs dynamic dispatch, vtables, closures, vector iteration and async state machines.
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently...
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…
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…
How to design a lock-free data structure? A detective story for curious developers.
My inspiration for this article was this thread in r/embedded . There are still many myths and misconception when it comes to the simple questions "Which compiler should I use?" or "Which compiler is the best?". I will try to share my practical experience with GCC, Clang and IAR on Cortex-M ( and Cortex-M only ). This…
A metaphor involving parking meters. Over the years, parking meters in town have evolved into a cumbersome, awkward system. Coins are heavy and you need to have them handy, meters need to be reinfo…
How moving from Vnode-based replication to tablets helps dynamically distribute data across the cluster, ultimately increasing ScyllaDB’s elasticity.
Almost every programming language uses 64-bit integers on typical modern Intel machines. OCaml uses a special 63-bit representation. How does it affect OCaml?
The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…
The product we’re building, a rack-scale computer, is specifically designed to be a centralized, integrated product because that’s what our customers need. This requirement and the design choices we’ve made to meet this need create some daily efficiency challenges for our team. As a remote-first company, we’re…
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
Legacy software systems in 2026: why they are still used, myths about legacy and Java, tips from our engineers, and when to upgrade Java.
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25905 to the Canary Channel. We are releasing ISOs for this build – they can be downloaded here. Starting with to
A little-discussed method enables inserting rows with bound data into SQLite faster than any existing technique. This novel method is then discovered to have a drawback that makes it generally unusable. The rest of this article explores how to get the best insert performance out of SQLite generally; what's in your…
In this blog post we discuss the details of two vulnerabilities we discovered in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference implementation code. These two vulnerabilities, an out-of-bounds write (CVE-2023-1017) and an out-of-bounds read (CVE-2023-1018), affected several TPM 2.0 software implementations (such as…
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
Building a database in the 2020s
MPEG-TS is still used extensively, even in “modern” transport mechanisms such as SRT, RIST and Zixi. Why though?
Introducing Apache Pinot 1.0 Release
sysclean(8) is a system tool designed for help system administrator to keep their OpenBSD clean after upgrade.
