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Scaling on EC2 - WebMynd's experiences (YC Winter '08)
Being an extension on the Recommended List brings explosive growth. This is an overview of some the things we’ve done to contain that expansion.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,945 posts.
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The disappointingly ongoing success of WvDial
In Farmington, CT, in fact, the town my cat was named after. Oh yes. That's how much we love that place. Lukasz, Ashok, and Matt will be...
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SSD Streaming at Last.fm
This is the second in a series of posts from the Last.fm engineering team covering the geekier aspects of our recent Last.fm on Xbox LIVE launch. Part one (“The War Room”) is here .
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BSD For Linux Users
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
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Finite State Entropy - A new breed of entropy coder
In compression theory, the entropy encoding stage is typically the last stage of a compression algorithm, the one where the gains from t...
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I/O Rings: When One I/O Operation is Not Enough
I usually write about security features or techniques on Windows. But today’s blog is not directly related to any security topics, other than the usual added risk that any new system call introduces. However, it’s an interesting addition to the I/O world in Windows that could be useful for developers and I thought it…
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Distributed systems for fun and profit (free ebook)
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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What colour are your bits? (2004)
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
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Google's VP8 video codec (and ffmpeg)
Now that the hype is over, let's talk the real deal. How good is Google's VP8 video codec? Since "multiple independent implementations help a standard mature quicker and become more useful to its users", me and others (David for the decoder core and PPC optimizations, Jason for x86 optimizations) decided that we…
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Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.
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JWZ, on Garbage Collection
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''
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Why Create a New Unix Shell?
This post explains the project's motivation from several perspectives. Unix shell is an old and successful technology, so there are many ways of looking at it.
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Changing the game with μTP
μTP or “micro-Transport Protocol” is a new protocol from BitTorrent, Inc. that is at the heart of the new major release of our popular BitTorrent clients “μTorrent” and “BitTorrent Mainline”. It is going to be available as the default transport mechanism in both μTorrent v2.0 and BitTorrent v7.0. So what’s the big…
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Performance Tuning PostgreSQL
Tuning your PostgreSQL database is somewhat of a black art. While documentation does exist on the topic, many people still find it hard to get all the power out of their system. This article aims to help.
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Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1
The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a …
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Cloud Computing Without Containers: Hello Isolates
We have a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why.
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Performance Improvements in .NET 5
Explore many performance improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET 5 runtime and core libraries to make apps and services leaner and faster.
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