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Anatomy of a DNS Lookup – Part II
and determined that most programs reference /etc/resolv.conf along the way to figuring out which DNS server to look up.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,944 posts.
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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
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Will that hub or dock slow your SSDs, or even make them faster?
How to connect a USB4 SSD to get better performance from an Intel Mac. Should you buy a Thunderbolt 4 hub, or a Thunderbolt 5 dock? Do any of these live ‘up to’ their claimed performanc…
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Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?
If you don’t want any of their services, you can turn Siri off in its settings, and disable indexing and search in Spotlight settings. Or you can use mdutil, if you know its limitations.
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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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For processing strings, streams in C++ can be slow
The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…
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On the Costs of Syscalls (2021)
It's well known that syscalls are expensive. And that software mitigations against CPU bugs (such as Meltdown) even have made them more expensive. But how expensive are they really? To begin to answer this question I wrote a small micro-benchmark in order to measure the minimal costs of a syscall …
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Monterey’s memory leak and how to avoid it
How this memory leak probably occurs, which apps it affects, and what you can do to avoid it completely.
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The Death of the Von Neumann Architecture
Lots of exciting new things were announced at the latest Apple WWDC this week, but hidden amongst the big announcements was an extension of something that's been bothering me for a while.
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Cracking LUKS/dm-crypt passphrases
Linux uses dm-crypt in order to provide transparent disk or partition encryption. What are the options in case you need to recover passphrase from such encryption? There are already ready-made tools, but we have also produced and published our own in order to support newer LUKS format/ciphers/hashing.
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A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
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A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
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Rare things become common at scale (2014)
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
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Progress in performance and scalability with CockroachDB
CockroachDB 2.1 is 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora at less than 2% of the price per tpmC. Read on to see performance benchmarks of CockroachDB 2.1, including the latest TPC-C results.
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Signalfd is useless
UNIX (well, POSIX) signals are probably one of the worst parts of the UNIX API, and that’s a relatively high bar. A signal can be sent to your program at any point when it’s running, and you have to deal with it somehow. Traditionally, there are three ways …
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Building a simple shell in C – Part 3
Implementing the execution functionality of the shell
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On Go, Portability, and System Interfaces
I've been noticing more and more lately that we have a plethora of libraries and programs written for Go, which don't work on one platform o...
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3 billion items in Java Map with 16 GB RAM
One rainy evening I meditated about memory managment in Java and how effectively Java collections utilise memory. I made simple experiment, how much entries can I insert into Java Map with 16 GB of RAM?
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Parsing bitstreams with Nom
How to use Nom to parse binary protocols at the level of individual bits
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Mu: A minimal hobbyist computing stack
Over the past year I've been working on a minimal-dependency hobbyist computing stack (everything above the processor) called Mu . The goal is to:
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JVM Performance Comparison for JDK 21
The current article describes a series of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) benchmarks with a primary focus on top-tier Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers, such as C2 JIT, and Graal JIT. The benchmarks are structured in three distinct (artificial) categories:
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Searching 20 GB/sec: Systems Engineering Before Algorithms (2014)
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