541
Do Not Log
Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I a...
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 582 posts.
542
Clang is better than GCC
Yes, this is a problem of weak static typing of pure C. Pure C is a great tool for some jobs, but here be dragons , as they say.
543
Kubernetes StatefulSets are Broken
Kubernetes was not originally intended for stateful applications. Kubernetes StatefulSets are Kubernetes' answer to storage-centric workloads.
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How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)
Fast compact external SSDs are prone to thermal throttling. This is demonstrated during tests writing 96 files, when transfer rates fell from 2 GB/s to around 700 MB/s.
545
Faster CRC32-C on x86
Computing the CRC-32C of a 4KB buffer on a modern x86 chip can be done as a simple loop around the crc32 instruction:
546
eBPF for tracing how Firefox uses page faults to load libraries
Modern browsers are some of the most complicated programs ever written. For example, the main Firefox library on my system is over 130Mbytes. Doing 130MB of IO poorly can be quite a performance hit, even with SSDs! :). Few people seem to understand how memory-mapped IO works. There are no pre-canned tools to observe…
547
Comparing TCP and QUIC
There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms…
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The world of PostgreSQL wire compatibility
A wire protocol is the format for interactions between a database server and its clients. It encompasses authentication, sending queries, receiving responses, and so on. It is a description of the exact bytes sent and received by servers and clients. It does NOT encompass the actual query language itself, let alone…
550
Cannoli: The Fast QEMU Tracer
Cannoli Cannoli is a high-performance tracing engine for qemu-user. It can record a trace of both PCs executed as well as memory operations. It consists of a small patch to QEMU to expose locations to inject some code directly into the JIT, a shared library which is loaded
551
The Life of MS-DOS
First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. This article details different versions and releases that all stemmed from Gary Kildall's QDOS.
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Building a simple shell in C – Part 3
Implementing the execution functionality of the shell
555
Parsing bitstreams with Nom
How to use Nom to parse binary protocols at the level of individual bits
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An upside-down backup strategy
An Upside-Down Backup Strategy I have a strange way of doing backups these days. When I save something, the master copy is in the cloud. If a file exists only on my local drive, it's not safe....
558
Microsoft Windows Network File System v4 Remote Code Execution
In this excerpt of a Trend Micro Vulnerability Research Service vulnerability report, Guy Lederfein and Quintin Crist of the Trend Micro Research Team detail a recently patched remote code execution vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system, originally discovered and reported by Yuki C
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FreeBSD on the Graviton 3
As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…
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Apple Silicon is an inconvenient truth
Link to: https://wormsandviruses.com/2022/07/a-burger-without-heinz/
563
Arcan Display Server 0.6.2 – It’s all connected
This release should put us at about half way through the planned work for the networking focus set of releases (0.6.x), a scope roughly defined by the article on A12: Advancing network transparency…
564
Frugal Computing (2021)
On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.
565
Multi-Kernel Drifting
Using truss, dtrace & ctfconvert to figure out a faulty illumos kernel module.
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Bytecode interpreters for tiny computers (2007)
I've previously come to the conclusion that there's little reason for using bytecode in the modern world, except in order to get more compact code, for which it can be very effective. So, what kind of a bytecode engine will give you more compact code?
568
This year in LLVM
Towards the end of last year, I switched from working on PHP at JetBrains, to working on LLVM at Red Hat. While it was already under discussion beforehand, this catalyzed the creation of the PHP foundation , which now pays multiple people to work on PHP. Special thanks for this go to Roman Pronskiy, who did most of…
569
Qt signal is ten times slower than a virtual function
I defined a QT Object that contains an integer value and uses QT signal along with awl::Observable based on virtual functions to notify the subscribers when the value changes:
570
Failing to reach DDR4 bandwidth
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