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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
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Lamport Clocks
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...
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NixOS is not reproducible
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…
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The C10K problem
It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now.
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Tar is an ill-specified format (2015)
http://invisible-island.net/ autoconf/ Copyright © 2014–2015,2016 by Thomas E. Dickey
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Latency matters
A month ago, danluu wrote about [terminal and shell performance](https://danluu.com/term-latency/). In that post, he measured the latency between a key being pressed and the corresponding character appearing in the terminal. Across terminals, median latencies ranged between 5 and 45 milliseconds, with the 99.9th…
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Fedora Atomic Desktops
Announcing a new family of Fedora Linux spins: Fedora Atomic. This will simplify how to discuss rpm-ostree and naming of future atomic spins.
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TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot attacks. The basic idea behind this implementation is to store the secret key inside CPU registers rather than in RAM.
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Docker in Production: A History of Failure (2016)
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i…
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Switching to the i3 window manager
After using the awesome window manager for 10 years, I have switched to i3, another tiling window manager with a different philosophy.
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The surprising subtleties of zeroing a register (2012)
Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The mo…
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AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation
If you compile your app for AVX2 and it runs on Windows ARM under Prism emulation, is it faster or slower than compiling for SSE2-4.x? I assumed it would be roughly the same — maybe slightly slower due to emulation overhead, but AVX2's wider operations would compensate. The
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Thoughts on the Systemd Root Exploit
Sebastian Krahmer of the SUSE Security Team has discovered a local root exploit in systemd v228 . A local user on a system running systemd v228 can escalate to root privileges. That's bad.
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Notes on ExFAT and Reliability (2021)
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
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Converting integers to decimal strings faster with AVX-512
In most systems, integers are stored using a fixed binary representation. It is common to store integers using 32-bit or 64-bit words. You sometimes need to convert it to a string. For example, the integer 12345 might need to be converted to the five characters '12345'. In an earlier blog post, I presented the simpler…
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Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The Dual Nature of Events in Event-Driven Architecture
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.
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Exploring Windows XP on macOS ARM64
Windows XP I have a lot of fond memories of Windows XP and after feeling nostalgic, I was happy to find out that it’s relatively easy to take it for a spin on an ARM64 Mac using QEMU. I decided to install XP and an assortment of classic software one final time, taking screenshots of the whole process. This included…
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LibreELEC 10.0
The final version of LibreELEC 10.0.0 has been released, bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.1 to LibreELEC users. Users of LibreELEC 10 Beta or RC1 get an automatic ...
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Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
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No, ZFS really doesn't need an fsck tool
(This blog entry has been recovered for the sole purpose of repairing a link in Hackernews. This blog entry is otherwise hidden on the website. 2026-04-13)
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Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right
What makes BEAM and OTP different from async/await, threads, and actors. Process isolation, supervisors, and why Erlang's model keeps winning 40 years later.
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Making Your Connection Bad
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…
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A Cloud-Scale Acceleration Architecture: FPGAs in Microsoft’s Datacenters
A hyperscale Configurable Cloud architecture using FPGAs to efficiently accelerate networking and applications with a distributed fabric in the data center.
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Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
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The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce
AWS EC2 Secret sauce. How AWS provisions Windows EC2 in the cloud. Instance Pool.