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We have broken HTTP
If you’re a web developer, then you owe your job to HTTP. You should probably know more about it than you do.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
How we optimized Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY-backed data streams to 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server, with millisecond-scale latency.
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Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system
A look at the new Fuchsia Operating System.
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Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks. Furthermore, the cost model can be extended to count "nearby" memory accesses as free. That is…
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Java’s new garbage collector promises low pause times on multi-terabyte heaps
Java 11 features a new Garbage Collector, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC), which is designed for very low pause times on huge multi-terabyte heaps. In this article we'll cover the motivation for a new GC, a technical overview and some of the really exciting possibilities ZGC opens up.
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Introducing S2
Introducing S2, a serverless stream store that makes durable real-time streams feel as simple and scalable as object storage.
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Convert Linux to Windows
Thesis: We should create a distro of Linux that runs Windows binaries by default via Wine.
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Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.
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Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupts downloads over Wi-Fi and TP-Link EOL'd it before I unboxed it. The fix is two zeros in sysfs. TP-Link's shell won't let me write them, so I wrote a kernel exploit for my own fucking access point.
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SQLite-on-the-server is misunderstood: Better at hyper-scale than micro-scale
Learn why SQLite-on-the-server fits hyper-scale systems when each tenant gets an isolated database with local reads, durable storage, and simple…
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A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap
How a 40-line OpenJDK fix swapped slow /proc parsing for a single clock_gettime syscall, closing a 400x thread CPU-time gap hidden for 20 years.
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The Various Kinds of IO – Blocking, Non-Blocking, Multiplexed and Async
A blog where I write down my thoughts, ideas and notions, as an exercise to cement them in my memory and improve on their concepts.
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Debugging memory corruption: who the hell writes "2" into my stack? (2016)
Several weeks ago we received a bug report from a customer that said their game was crashing when using IL2CPP scripting backend. QA verified the bug and assigned it to me for fixing. The project was quite big (although far from the largest ones); it took 40 minutes to build on my machine. The instructions on the bug…
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Booting to Rust
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
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Microsoft finds privilege escalation vulnerability in Huawei driver
Our discovery of two privilege escalation vulnerabilities in a driver highlights the strength of Microsoft Defender ATP’s sensors. These sensors expose anomalous behavior and give SecOps personnel the intelligence and tools to investigate threats, as we did.
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Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing
One of my favorite Amazon Leadership Principles is Customer Obsession. When we launched AWS Lambda, we focused on giving developers a secure serverless experience so that they could avoid managing infrastructure. In order to attain the desired level of isolation we used dedicated EC2 instances for each customer. This…
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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
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A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21277 (RS_PRERELEASE) to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. As mentioned here, we are giving Windows Insiders in
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Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches (2018)
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in coll…
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Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V
What It Takes to Run The Witcher 3 on RiSC-V
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ClickHouse gets lazier and faster: Introducing lazy materialization
ClickHouse learned to procrastinate strategically. Discover how lazy materialization skips unnecessary column reads to accelerate queries.
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Zero Cost Abstractions
Rust claims to enable abstraction without overhead. How does that claim hold up in practice?
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To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
The new "Fractal" operating system kernel, developed at MIT, gives researchers a clearer look at how computer chips work internally. It was used to study the branch predictors inside Apple's M1 processor, where it revealed a potential vulnerability to major speculative attacks.
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How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives