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Without the futex, it's futile
Review: It's a history text, not a CS text
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
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Improving performance of rav1d video decoder
*on macOS with an M3 chip *slightly more than 1%, on a specific benchmark, without any new unsafe code A while ago, memorysafety.org announced a contest for …
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Why is the Rust compiler so slow?
I spent a month repeatedly building my website in Docker, and now have horrors to share.
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Performance optimization is hard because it's fundamentally a brute-force task
I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization…
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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
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It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)
In a really broad sense, the history of observability tools over the past couple of decades have been about a pretty simple concept: how do we make terabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data comprehensible to human beings? We’ve seen different companies tackle this in different ways for technology like Ruby on Rails…
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Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity
A technical blog about Rust, Linux and other topics.
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Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes
Don't you love misleading documentation?
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Going down the rabbit hole of Git's new bundle-URI
Git's new bundle-uri could help significantly speed up clones, but what bugs lurk within?
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Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops
Linaro Connect 2025 showcases progress in bringing Linux on Snapdragon-Powered Devices
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Landlock-Ing Linux
Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD’s unveil() and (less so) pledge() : programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, “I only need these files or resources — deny me everything else if I’m…
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Rust compiler performance
Perhaps the most often repeated complaint about Rust is its slow feedback loop and long compilation times. I hear about it all the time; in Rust podcasts, blog posts, surveys, conference talks or offline discussions. I also regularly complain about it, being a Rust user myself!
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Distributed systems programming has stalled
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
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DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list
Why does Space Station 14 crash with ANGLE on ARM64? 6 hours later…
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Big GPUs don't need big PCs
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
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io_uring is faster than mmap
Sourcing data directly from disk IS faster than caching in memory. I brought receipts. Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is scaling and avoid what isn't.
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K8s with 1M nodes
This is an effort to create a fully functional Kubernetes cluster with 1 million active nodes.
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What to expect from Debian/Trixie
Update on 2025-07-28: added note about Debian 13/trixie support for OpenVox (thanks, Ben Ford!)
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The Anatomy of a macOS App
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
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Removing newlines in FASTA file increases ZSTD compression ratio by 10x
First released with Zstandard 1.3.2 in 2017, the --long range match finder increases the compressor’s search window to at least 128MiB, improving deduplication inside large files. This optional feature had substantial performance overheads at launch, but various optimisations have since brought its performance within…
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My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules
Several years ago, I spent a serious chunk of time figuring out how to make really teensy ELF executable files. I started down this path because I was annoyed that all of my programs, no matter how short they were, never got smaller than 4k or so. I felt that was excessive, for C, and so I started looking at what ELF…
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QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop
Try the first release of the QNX Developer Desktop, a self‑hosted QNX development environment that eliminates cross‑compilation for faster workflows.
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How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB
Radar offers geocoding, place search, and fraud detection APIs, powered by HorizonDB, a Rust-based engine delivering 20k QPS and sub-millisecond latency.
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The power of interning: making a time series database smaller
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
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Addressing the adding situation
We learn why adding on x86 isn't as obvious as you might think