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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 278 posts.

2014
35

How to zero a buffer

Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…

45

68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard

What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…

46

PHP 7's new hashtable implementation

About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…

49

Game servers: UDP vs TCP

When writing networked games, the question of UDP vs TCP will eventually come up. Typically you will hear people say things like: “Unless you’re doing action games, you can use TCP&#822…

53

Update on Metro

Earlier this week, I asked our engineering leads and release managers to take the Windows Metro version of Firefox off the trains. The team is solid and did good work, ...

60

Low Cost EC2 Instances With Burstable Performance

Even though the speedometer in my car maxes out at 150 MPH, I rarely drive at that speed (and the top end may be more optimistic than realistic), but it is certainly nice to have the option to do so when the time and the circumstances are right. Most of the time I am using […]