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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.

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6246

Instructions per cycle: AMD Zen 2 versus Intel

The performance of a processor is determined by several factors. For example, processors with a higher frequency tend to do more work per unit of time. Physics makes it difficult to produce processors that have higher frequency. Modern processors can execute many instructions per cycle. Thus a 3.4GHz processor has 3.4…

6249

EC2 Instance Update – C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage

As you can see from my EC2 Instance History post, we add new instance types on a regular and frequent basis. Driven by increasingly powerful processors and designed to address an ever-widening set of use cases, the size and diversity of this list reflects the equally diverse group of EC2 customers! Near the bottom of…

6250

EC2 Maintenance Update II

I’d like to give you an update on the EC2 Maintenance announcement that I posted last week. Late yesterday (September 30th), we completed a reboot of less than 10% of the EC2 fleet to protect you from any security risks associated with the Xen Security Advisory (XSA-108). This Xen Security Advisory was embargoed until…

6252

EC2 Boot Time Benchmarking

Once I finished writing ec2-boot-bench, the natural next step was to run some tests — in particular, to see how FreeBSD compared to other operating systems used in EC2. I used the c5.xlarge instance type and tested FreeBSD releases since 11.1-RELEASE (the first FreeBSD release which can run on the c5.xlarge instance…

6259

What Shell Am I Using?

I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…