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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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JIT-Less V8
V8 v7.4 supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime.
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I'm not feeling the async pressure
An introduction to back pressure in systems and why it matters.
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Beating Google's kernelCTF PoW using AVX512
PoW is gone 🦀🦀
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How Discord Indexes Billions of Messages Using Elasticsearch
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin
Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLite CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardware, it’s possible to …
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Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
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Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a… Continue reading →
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BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
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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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I sped up serde_json strings by 20%
I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for…
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Understanding L1 Terminal Fault aka Foreshadow: What You Need to Know
L1 Terminal Fault/Foreshadow explained in ~three minutesFor a more detailed technical view of L1 Terminal Fault, please see this deeper dive with Jon Masters.How we got here: a brief history of modern microprocessor cachesModern computer microprocessors are complex machines, filled with many optimizations designed to…
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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Linux Desktop Environments System Usage
Over the years I've seen a lot of poorly made comparisons of Linux Desktop Environments in terms of system usage and in this article I want to make things right once and for all.
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Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery
I got the chance to investigate an interesting bug in SerenityOS this week. It was related to the decoding of JPG images in the operating system. For some reason, when a JPG image is viewed, it comes out like this: Lenna, showing up with incorrect colors. Weird, huh? Also seems like a simple confusion of RGB vs. BGR…
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How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Idempotency is easy until the second request is different
Idempotency is not just an HTTP header or a key lookup. This article covers the failure cases that bite real APIs: different requests with the same key, concurrent retries, partial success, downstream uncertainty, response replay, expiry, and duplicate message handling.
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TinyWM – A tiny window manager in around 50 lines of C
TinyWM is a tiny window manager that I created as an exercise in minimalism. It is also maybe helpful in learning some of the very basics of creating a window manager. It is only around 50 lines of C. There is also a Python version using python-xlib.
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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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There isn't much point to HTTP/2 past the load balancer
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
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Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs
The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 and BSDCan 2025 - Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.
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Making SQL Server run on Linux
This post was authored by Scott Konersmann, Partner Engineering Manager, SQL Server, Slava Oks, Partner Group Engineering Manager, SQL Server, and Tobias Ternstrom, Principal Program Manager, SQL Server. Introduction We first announced SQL Server on Linux in March, and recently released the first public preview of SQL…
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How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
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XCurl
It is often said that Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery. Also, remember libcrurl? That was the name of the thing Google once planned to do: reimplement the libcurl API on top of their Chrome networking library. Flattery or not, it never went anywhere. The other day I received an email asking me about ……
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