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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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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
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Post Mortem: A single whitespace character
Cloud printing for retail and food and beverage operations.
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Apple has a bug in its disk I/O throttling code that affects raw disk copies
Matt Jacobson, recovering software engineer.
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What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console
When Windows 10 Anniversary Update (AU) was shipped, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was still far from complete, and was known to have many
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I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users (2019)
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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From zero to main(): How to write a bootloader from scratch
A community and blog for embedded software makers
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.NET 6 vs .NET 5 speedup
A year ago I wrote a post comparing .NET 5 performance with its predecessor on Fusion performance tests, and honestly, I was quite…
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Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
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Three Years on Google App Engine
For the last 3 years I worked on an application that runs on Google App Engine. It is a fascinating, unique piece of service Google is offering here. Unlike anything you’ll find elsewhere. This is my in-depth, personal take on it.
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When network is faster than browser cache (2020)
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
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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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Writing a file system from scratch in Rust
A file system is responsible for organising and providing an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored. In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.
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Concurrent Programming, with Examples
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
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A distributed systems reading list
An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals
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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.
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Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
A storage appliance that shipped before AVX2 existed now runs Google's Gemma 4 26B in my basement, no GPU. Here's how we got a modern MoE model onto a CPU older than the instructions its inference engine assumed were there.
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Zig's New Async I/O
In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today , here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025 .
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Install Windows the Arch Linux Way
Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide!
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Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
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50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?
Two phase locking (2PL) was the first of the general-purpose Concurrency Controls to be invented which provided Serializability. In fact, 2P...
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Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?
Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger…