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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 582 posts.
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What they don't teach you about sockets
In order to effectively write applications that communicate via sockets, there were some realizations I needed to make that weren't explicitly told to me by any of the documentation I read.
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35M Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx
Have you ever wondered about the performance delta between Caddy and Nginx? Wonder no more.
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Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)
I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost. Resize the system…
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Everything Is Broken: Shipping Rust-Minidump at Mozilla
We've been working on the development of rust-minidump. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are and how we made rust-minidump.
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Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
I run FreeBSD as my daily driver on both my main workstation and on all my servers and I have been running FreeBSD since about 1999 because I consider it an amazing operating system. In this article I will address some of the technical reasons for choosing FreeBSD over a GNU/Linux distribution.
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How the SQLite virtual machine works
Let's look at how SQLite parses, optimizes, and compiles every query that it receives.
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The collapse of complex software
In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great…
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An X11 apologist tries Wayland
I think it’s only fair to call me an X apologist. I get incredibly frustrated when people talk about dropping support for X11. I fight back against the notion that some day X11 will be dead and unmaintained, a curiosity of a time before. I’ve spoken to people in my circles at-length about the accessibility tools that…
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I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond
... in which we check if your password has been compromised in many inconvenient ways, in a tale of destruction, obsession, and self-discovery.
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I/O is no longer the bottleneck
In 2022, disk I/O is very fast, and not usually the performance bottleneck in programs. This article digs into some numbers.
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Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals
so here's a short tutorial on ansi escape codes and terminal control, because you philistines won't stop using ncurses and oh my god WHY ARE WE STILL USING NCURSES IT IS THE TWENTY FIRST FUCKING CENTURY
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Effects of grill patterns on fan performance/noise (2011)
Fan grills are a component in a computer that is often underestimated in terms of their contribution to both system noise and airflow. Most often, grills are chosen based on aesthetics with only a small thought towards performance. In this article, we will be examining nine different grills to determine the effects of…
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Distributed Systems Shibboleths
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
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5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
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Improved Process Isolation in Firefox 100
Firefox uses a multi-process model for additional security and stability while browsing. Web Content is rendered in separate processes.
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Blender: Wayland Support on Linux
Introducing native support for the popular display server protocol on Linux.
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Rust is actually portable
Gautham's Blog
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WebVM: Server-less x86 virtual machines in the browser
We made a server-less virtual Linux environment that runs unmodified Debian binaries in the browser. This is powered by CheerpX, a WebAssembly virtualization platform. Feel free to play with it and report bugs: https://webvm.io
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How SQLite Helps You Do ACID
Let's take a peek at how the rollback journal works.
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A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS
Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a…
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Turning SQLite into a Distributed Database
mvSQLite is the open-source , SQLite-compatible distributed database. We decoupled SQLite's storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet "bottomless" scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.
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I 10x'd a TI-84 emulator's speed by replacing a switch-case
There’s a javascript emulator for the TI83+, TI84+, and TI84+CSE calculators called jsTIfied, which was written by Christopher Mitchell, founder of the calculator fan site cemetech.net. There’s not a whole lot of reasons to use it over something else if you’ve got a native option available, but if you don’t it’s…
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How Uber Uses Zig
I talked at the first Zig meetup in Milan about Uber's early experience with Zig: a little about how Uber uses Zig and more about my experience of bringing Zig to Uber, from both technical and social aspects.