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1.1B Taxi Rides on Kdb+/q and 4 Xeon Phi CPUs
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Writing a Fast JSON Parser
Several holidays ago, I got a bee in my bonnet and wrote a fast JSON parser whose parsed AST fits in a single contiguous block of memory. The code was small and simple and the performance was generally on-par with RapidJSON, so I stopped and moved on with my life.
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Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an…
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Saving Data: Reducing the Size of App Updates by 65%
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
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Do not taunt happy fun branch predictor
I recently came up with a "clever" idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don't fall victim in the future.
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Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Microservices
This blog post is adapted from a lightning talk I gave at the Boston Golang meetup in December of 2015. For a while, it seemed like everyone was crazy for microservices. You couldn’t open up your favorite news aggregator of choice without some company you had never heard of touting how the move t
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A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...
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A Rust-Based Unikernel: First Version of a Rust-Based LibOS
A Unikernel for Extreme-Scale Computing
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Compiling LLMs into a MegaKernel: A path to low-latency inference
TL;DR: We developed a compiler that automatically transforms LLM inference into a single megakernel — a fused GPU kernel that performs…
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The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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On WD Red NAS Drives
On WD Red NAS Drives - Data - Western Digital (WD) Corporate Blog
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Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support
Libreboot – Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” released! With full UEFI support.
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Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
This month, the Google Play team in our London office was hyped to welcome back Anamaria Cotîrlea, a former intern who is now a full-time ...
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How I Switched to Plan 9
Hi, I’m SL . You may remember me from my classic appearances in contentious 9fans threads , or maybe you’ve read one of my books .
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My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter
In online forums, I often see questions from people new to C++ asking for recommended reading. I usually respond with a certain set of trusted books, with the caveat that no amount of reading makes up for practice: you have to actually work on something. But what would be a good project to work on? Something that…
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APFS does not normalize Unicode filenames
“iOS HFS Normalized UNICODE names, APFS now treats all files as a bag of bytes on iOS. We are requesting that Applications developers call the correct Normalization routines to make sure the file name contains the correct representation.”
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Patterns of Distributed Systems (2020)
A catalog of patterns to better understand, communicate, and teach the design of distributed systems
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Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021
And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been. — Rainer Maria Rilke January 4th 2021 was the first working day of the year for many around the globe, and for most of us at Slack too (except of course for our on-callers and our customer experience team, who never…
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Disambiguating Arm, Arm ARM, ARMv9, ARM9, ARM64, AArch64, A64, A78, ...
If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about.
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How we spent two weeks hunting an NFS bug in the Linux kernel
Here's an in-depth recap of debugging a GitLab issue that culminated in a patch for the Linux kernel.
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I spent a week without IPv4 to understand IPv6 transition mechanisms
The time has come to talk about something uncomfortable to a lot of you. You’ve been using legacy methods for far too long. It’s time to move to IPv6. But, of course, there’s a lot more to IPv6 than ‘just’ switching everything over. A lot of systems in the world still haven’t…
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We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
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RHEL is deprecating KDE
By a strange coincidence the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all. Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome. It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and…
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Debian riscv64
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the...