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Low latency tuning guide
This guide describes how to tune your AMD64/x86_64 hardware and Linux system for running real-time or low latency workloads.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 533 posts.
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Windows Package Manager Preview
We are thrilled to announce the Windows Package Manager preview! If you’re already familiar with what a package manager is, feel free to skip this
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macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
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Apple has stopped providing standalone installers for macOS updates
Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters …
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My experience with NixOS
In a nutshell, NixOS is a operating system based on Linux that provides a declarative package and configuration management.
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Remote iPhone exploitation part 2: a remote ASLR bypass
Posted by Samuel Groß, Project ZeroThis post is the second in a series about a remote, interactio...
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Why is Idris 2 so much faster than Idris 1?
I've just released a new version of Idris 2 , which is a significant release in that it's the first one which is able to compile itself. Thus, it's the first one where we can really see how the performance of Idris 2 improves on the performance of Idris 1.
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Systems that defy detailed understanding
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
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Why the EAX register of x86 is called that
Usually, x86 tutorials don’t spend much time explaining the historical perspective of design and naming decisions. When learning x86 assembly, you’re usually told something along the lines: Here’s EAX . It’s a register. Use it.
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
As announced on the mailing list , on Friday, Dec 27 2019, our package compression scheme has changed from xz (.pkg.tar.xz) to zstd (.pkg.tar.zst) .
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Is the web getting slower?
As consumer devices and internet speeds become faster, websites become larger and more complex. Is website performance getting worse overall?
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How do Unix pipes work?
Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post . Let's look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let's download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.
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Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
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CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
In response to popular demand, Microsoft announced a new feature of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2)—GPU acceleration—at the Build conference in May 2020. This feature opens the gate for many…
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eBPF Is Awesome
A blog about programming, technology and open-source stuff.
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Fast UTF-8 validation
One of the most common "data type" in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array of characters. It is often a "good enough" approximation, but reality is more complex. The characters must be encoded into bits in some way. Most ……
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Urbit OS 1
OS 1 is somewhere between ‘productivity software’ and a ‘social network’. We think it’s the beginning of an altogether new breed of social computing.
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Millions of Tiny Databases
Millions of tiny databases, Brooker et al., NSDI’20 This paper is a real joy to read. It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of …
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Data-Oriented Architecture
An in-depth look at Data-Oriented Architecture (DOA): monolithic data stores vs microservices, scaling benefits, and real-world case studies.
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Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU
I booted the arm64e kernel of macOS 11.0.1 beta 1 kernel in QEMU up to launchd. It’s completely useless, but may be interesting if you’re wondering how an Apple Silicon Mac will boot.
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A better Kubernetes from the ground up
If we were to start over from first principles, what would I do differently than k8s?
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Writing a full-text search engine using Bloom filters (2013)
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…