5581
Do Files want to be Actors?
Is 1970s distributed systems theory finally meeting 2020s kernel development?
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
5582
The messy reality of SIMD (vector) functions
We’ve discussed SIMD and vectorization extensively on this blog, and it was only a matter of time before SIMD (or vector) functions came up. In this post, we explore what SIMD functions are, when they are useful, and how to declare and use them effectively. A SIMD function is a function that processes more than… Read
5583
Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
5584
Postmortem of the failure of one hosting storage unit on Jan. 8, 2020
On January 8, 2020 at 14:51 UTC, one of our storage units used for our hosting services hosted at LU-BI1 went down.
5585
AMD EPYC Performance Testing with systemd
With packet.net making bare metal servers available to cloud users, Percona CTO Vadim Tkachenko enjoys the opportunity to carry out some performance benchmarks with EPYC CPU, and experiences some surprising results running Percona Server for MySQL under systemd.
5586
Hyprland Crash Course
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating.
5587
The Performance Cost of CORS Requests on Single-Page Applications
The title may lead you to think that this post is another ranting post about the downside of a “Single Page Application”. It is more about…
5588
A survey of recent iOS kernel exploits
Posted by Brandon Azad, Project ZeroI recently found myself wishing for a single online reference...
5589
Considering performance in the small is not “premature optimization”
DISCLAIMER : The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
5590
Firmware Updates and Initial Performance Data for Data Center Systems
Intel Newsroom delivers the latest news, announcements, and updates. Stay informed on Intel innovations.
5591
5592
My Experience with Nix on OS X
Some time ago, I’ve moved this jekyll-based blog from GitHub Pages to a self-hosted NixOS server. A few weeks ago, I’ve also moved some parts of my local OS X environment from homebrew over to nix.
5593
450× Faster Joins with Index Condition Pushdown
Introduction Readyset is designed to serve queries from cached views with sub-millisecond latency. This post focuses on the cold path—cases where a cache miss forces execution against the base tables. In these scenari...
5594
All Software is Legacy
In what may be judged in years to come as a moment of madness, I have volunteered to be the primary maintainer of the Perl CGI module (CGI.pm). For the non-technical readers of this post: CGI.pm is a few thousand lines of code that in the mid to late nineties, and even some years later, was helping many websites…
5595
Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon
A WebAssembly module's linear memory can be shared directly with the Apple Silicon GPU: no copies, no serialization, no intermediate buffers. Here's how the zero-copy chain works, what we measured, and what it enables for stateful AI inference.
5596
Splitting the Ping
Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the few things that is shipped with all network stacks.
5597
5598
jwz: Apple recently broke Ctrl-Y
Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…
5599
How Uber Protects Against Retry Storms
What if retries could know when they’re helping, and when they’re making things worse? Uber Engineering built error ownership to prevent and contain retry storms.
5600
How Facebook deals with PCIe faults to keep its data centers running reliably
Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) hardware continues to push the boundaries of computing thanks to advances in transfer speeds, the number of available lanes for simultaneous data de…
5601
Java Virtual Threads Ate My Memory: A Web Crawler's Tale of Speed vs. Memory
I built a simple web crawler using good old platform threads. It was just a multithreaded crawler, nothing fancy. But then, curiosity…
5602
Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
5603
5604
RISC-V SBI and the full boot process
Detailed explanation on how RISC-V boot process works and what role SBI has in the RISC-V software stack. Concrete example with OpenSBI.
5605
5606
5607
Feature Casualties of Large Databases
Databases shed important RDMS features as they get big. Examining why this tends to be the case, and some ideas for preventing it.
5608
5609
5610
How to port your OS to EC2 (2018)
You're going to want to make some changes to what goes into that disk image later, but for now just build a disk image.