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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 148 posts.
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This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now
From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share where all this caching is going to live as we just installed it at the hosting ce…
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Fast enough VMs in fast enough time
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
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Firefox finally plugs the leak
Leaky add-ons are a big problem, but there’s been lots of action relating to them recently. What follows is a summary of the situation and a request for help from currently Nightly testers who use add-ons.
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We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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EC2 I/O
SentinelOne unifies AI-powered endpoint, cloud, identity, and data protection—enhanced by our Security Data Lake for seamless and efficient cybersecurity.
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Reddit: 2012 State of the Servers
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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How key-based cache expiration works
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton Doing cache invalidation by hand is an incredibly frustrating and error-prone process. You’re very likely to forget a spot and let stale data get served. That’s enough to turn…
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“iCloud Backup”
Last year, I bought my 87-year-old grandfather an iPad 2 to replace the who-knows-what PC that was frustrating him constantly. He only used the PC for email and playing music, so it was a no-brainer.
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Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua
At CloudFlare, Nginx is at the core of what we do. It is part of the underlying foundation of our reverse proxy service. In addition to the built-in Nginx functionalities, we use an array of custom C modules...
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Let's Build an MP3 Decoder
Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…
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The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances
By that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.
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Linux Local Privilege Escalation via SUID /proc/pid/mem Write
Introducing Mempodipper , an exploit for CVE-2012-0056. /proc/ pid /mem is an interface for reading and writing, directly, process memory by seeking around with the same addresses as the process's virtual memory space. In 2.6.39, the protections against unauthorized access to /proc/ pid /mem were deemed sufficient…
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Interesting new Unix commands/binaries in OS X Mountain Lion
In addition to those on its well-known list of 200+ new features, OS X Mountain Lion also brings along a handful of new UNIX commands and binaries. Most are probably outside the scope of Ask Different (e.g. commands concerning Radius Authentication, Kerberos or Berkeley DB maintainance) but some of them may prove…
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Plan 9: The way the future was
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
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Linux 3.5 Kernel Released
Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux kernel during the 3.5 development cycle
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Understanding C by learning assembly
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.
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Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand drive crisis
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
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Many Core processors: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong
David Ungar is "an out-of-the-box thinker who enjoys the challenge of building computer software systems that work like magic and fit a user...
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Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks
Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including Firebug. For many users with add-ons installed this will significantly reduce Firefox’s memory consumption, without requiring upgrades to those add-ons.
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Apple's HTTP POST caching is a bug
One of the changes in Apple’s release of iOS6 last week was a surprising new ability to cache POST responses.
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Format string vulnerability found in 'sudo'
A flaw exists in the debugging code in sudo versions 1.8.0 through 1.8.3p1 that can be used to crash sudo or potentially allow an unauthorized user to elevate privileges. Sudo versions affected: 1.8.0 through 1.8.3p1 inclusive. Older versions of sudo are not affected. CVE ID: This vulnerability has been assigned…