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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 190 posts.

2013
64

Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles

My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.

71

The network is reliable

I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.

78

Call me maybe: Redis redux

In a recent blog post , antirez detailed a new operation in Redis: WAIT . WAIT is proposed as an enhancement to Redis’ replication protocol to reduce the window of data loss in replicated Redis systems; clients can block awaiting acknowledgement of a write to a given number of nodes (or time out if the given threshold…

79

Happy new year and goodbye bzip2

We started listing xz-compressed versions of kernel archives in all our announcements back in March 2013, and the time has come to complete the switch. Effective immediately, we will no longer be providing bzip2-compressed versions for new releases of the Linux kernel and other software. Any previously released…

80

Tracking down a memory leak in Ruby's EventMachine

At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough…

89

More on Postgres Performance

If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on…