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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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Building a distributed time-series database on PostgreSQL
Fully managed PostgreSQL from the creators of TimescaleDB. 99.9% uptime SLA, 10,000+ IOPS, columnar compression up to 95%, and built-in search. Try it free.
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How to sleep at night having a cloud service: common architecture do's
I like to sleep, but more importantly, I like to sleep while my cloud service is running.
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Shared Cache Is Going Away
Browsers historically have had a single HTTP Cache. This meant that if www.a.example and www.b.example both used cdn.example/jquery-1.2.1.js then JQuery would only be downloaded once. Since it's the same resource regardless of which site initiates the download, a single shared cache is more efficient. [1]…
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Xfce 4.14
Today, after 4 years and 5 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.
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So you think you know C? (2016)
It's a C test. If you think you know C, take this test. It only has 5 questions.
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PostgreSQL Features to Try
pgDash is an in-depth monitoring solution designed specifically for PostgreSQL deployments. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics.
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Operating a large distributed system in a reliable way: practices I learned
For the past few years, I've been building and operating a large distributed system: the payments system at Uber [https://eng.uber.com/payments-platform/]. I've learned a lot about distributed architecture concepts…
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Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker
My story of replacing three servers, across two countries, running two operating systems with a single server running Alpine Linux and Docker.
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Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
Today’s blog post is an overview of some common optimization techniques and neat tricks for doing “systems programming” – whatever that means today. We’ll walk through some methods to make your code run faster, be more efficient, and to squeeze just a little more juice from whatever you got.
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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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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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Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
During me being at my parents over the holidays (Christmas 2017) I had the usual IT-support stuff to do, that always happens to tech sa...
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SerenityOS: From Zero to HTML in a Year
The Serenity operating system turns 1 year old today. I'm counting from the first commit in the git repository , on October 10, 2018. Parts of the code had been around for a while before that, so this first commit was really about putting everything I was tinkering with into a shared repo.
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V8: A Year with Spectre
The V8 team details their analysis and mitigation strategy for Spectre, one of the top computer security issues of 2018.
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LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
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How Rust optimizes async/await
The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
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Zero Cost Abstractions
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
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Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy
Starting at 1342 UTC today we experienced a global outage across our network that resulted in visitors to Cloudflare-proxied domains being shown 502 errors (“Bad Gateway”). The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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JIT-Less V8
V8 v7.4 supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime.
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Writing an OS in Rust: Advanced Paging
This post explains techniques to make the physical page table frames accessible to our kernel. It then uses such a technique to implement a function t…
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Firefox brings smooth video playback with the fastest AV1 decoder
With this week's release of Firefox 67, the new high performance royalty-free AV1 video decoder dav1d is now enabled by default on all desktop platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux) for ...
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Measuring mutexes, spinlocks and how bad the Linux scheduler is
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
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Vertically Scaling PostgreSQL
pgDash is an in-depth monitoring solution designed specifically for PostgreSQL deployments. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics.