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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
Maximize the performance of your hardware with memory access amortization
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
Last weekend I wanted to get some inspiration to write some TLA+ spec and I got my hands back on the paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events...
Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the…
Announcing a new family of Fedora Linux spins: Fedora Atomic. This will simplify how to discuss rpm-ostree and naming of future atomic spins.
Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.
This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…
What is bufferbloat, why is it bad, and what to do about it
Request rate is the number of requests that arrive, or are serviced, or leave, during some period.
An investigation into the internals of Sidekiq, one of the most popular Ruby background job processors.
Last time we counted CPU instructions, let’s look at syscalls now!
To test if a display interface works we often don't want to use a huge framework like GTK or Qt. This article shows an easy way on how we can use a framebuffer directly on a DRM graphics driver under Linux.
As a side-quest I recently decided to write a branchless utf8 decoder utilizing the pext or "parallel extract" instruction. It's compliant with rfc-3629 , meaning that it doesn't just naively decode the code-point but also checks for overlong encoding, surrogate pairs and such. Compiled with gcc -O3 -march=x86-64-v3…
RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
Project community server: https://discord.gg/side7 On September 20th, 2022, the live-service first-person hero shooter "GUNDAM EVOLUTION" was launched. A little over a year later, on November 29th, 2023, it abruptly reached its end of life. As a passionate enthusiast of hero shooters and the Gundam franchise, the…
Ideally, you’d want your program to work everywhere. Unfortunately, that’s not that simple, even if you’re using high-level “portable” languages such as Python. In thi…
Learn how you can use XDP/eBPF to get maximum bandwidth for your applications.
[English]These are currently difficult times for customers and resellers of VMware products who want to reorder, extend licenses or simply activate product licenses. After the Broadcom takeover…
Let's create an hello world init program that the kernel can execute to show that everything works correctly:
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
Garbage collectors are expected to be invisible: if programmers (or even users) notice them, something is wrong. Usually, such problems are are performance problems, but there could be correctness issues as well. This makes implementing them a bit scary.
Backpressure is something nearly every software engineer will have to deal with at some point, and for some it’s a frequent problem. But…
Didn't even make it out of the gate.
