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Visualizing Ext4
What does ext4 look like?
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
932
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 .
933
What happened to WebAssembly
Where are they now? You won't believe her new look!
934
The Perils of M1 Ownership
The primary admin account on an M1 Mac is its Owner, responsible for authorising the installation and use of second operating systems. Here’s what can go wrong with Ownership.
935
TCP, the workhorse of the internet
What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.
936
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…
937
AWS EC2 Container Service
Earlier this year I wrote about container computing and enumerated some of the benefits that you get when you use it as the basis for a distributed application platform: consistency & fidelity, development efficiency, and operational efficiency. Because containers are lighter in weight and have less memory and…
938
How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
We rewrote critical software that powers all online storefronts on Shopify, offering the fastest online shopping experience, entirely from scratch and without downtime.
939
Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
940
Running Pong in 240 browser tabs
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
941
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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Git for Windows accidentally creates NTFS alternate data streams
As part of the small minority of devs at my company who primarily run Windows, I’m accustomed to working around occasional Unix-specific behaviors in our build and deployment systems. Cygwin makes most stuff just work, I can fix simple incompatibilities myself, and as a last resort I can always boot into OSX for a…
944
Python: The Optimization Ladder
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
945
Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Take a tour through hundreds of performance improvements in .NET 11.
946
TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish
TinyKVM can be used to sandbox regular Linux programs or programs with specialized APIs embedded into your servers.
947
The compiler will optimize that away
A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…
948
M1 Macs have another hidden boot mode
Apple has revealed the hidden Fallback Recovery OS mode available on M1 Macs. How to enter and use it, and why it’s another big plus.
949
Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by Aditya Mavlankar, Liwei Guo, Anush Moorthy and Anne Aaron
950
Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
951
Why Android can't use CDC Ethernet (2023)
A detective story with a silly ending
952
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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Scaling GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
955
Cloud VM benchmarks 2026
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
956
Using io_uring for network I/O
Discover io_uring, an async I/O API for Linux that can potentially benefit networking, and learn how to integrate it into your applications and I/O libraries.
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Exploiting the Wi-Fi Stack on Apple Devices
Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project ZeroIn this blog post we’ll complete our goal of achieving...
959
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.
960
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.