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A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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We switched to Java 21 virtual threads and got a deadlock in TPC-C for Postgres
We revise some fundamental background and highlight an important concern behind Java 21 virtual threads: deadlocks might be unpredictable
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FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
Docker has recently stormed into software development. While its concepts are powerful and valuable, similar tools have been used in systems for decades. FreeBSD’s jails in one of those tools which build upon even older chroot(2). To put it shortly, with these tools, you can make a safe environment separated from the…
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Neki – Sharded Postgres
Neki, sharded Postgres by PlanetScale, is now available in platform preview.
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Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15
I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps . (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact…
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TypeScript as fast as Rust: TypeScript++
TL;DR: This is a proposal to create a language that sits somewhere between Typescript and Rust, and which you can incrementally adopt if you already use Typescript.
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How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
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Task_t considered harmful
Posted by Ian Beer, Project ZeroThis post discusses a design issue at the core of the XNU kernel ...
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Killing a process and all of its descendants
Killing processes in a Unix-like system can be trickier than expected. Last week I was debugging an odd issue related to job stopping on Semaphore. More specifically, an issue related to the killing of a running process in a job.
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Implementing a GPU's programming model on a CPU
SIMT The programming model of a GPU uses what has been coined "single instruction multiple thread." The idea is that the programmer writes t...
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APIs, robustness, and idempotency
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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Why is Python slow
In case you missed it, Marius recently wrote a post on the Pyston blog about our baseline JIT tier. Our baseline JIT sits between our interpreter tier and our LLVM JIT tier, providing better speed…
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Random Acts of Optimization
Game developers working on a continuously evolving product like League of Legends are constantly battling against the forces of entropy as they add more and more content into unfortunately finite machines. New content carries implicit cost…
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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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The V8 Sandbox
V8 features a lightweight, in-process sandbox to limit the impact of memory corruption bugs
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The Many Possibilities of iMessage File Vulnerability
Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Project ZeroCVE-2019-8646 is a somewhat unusual vulnerability I re...
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The Pinecone Overlay Network
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Does a compiler use all x86 instructions? (2010)
On the Z80 CPU there are so few registers and instructions that you can easily know and use them all and wish there were more of them. However, half of the time it feels like the only on you really use is ld. I imagine that if ld took half the number of clock cycles, average code would run twice as fast.
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Benchmarking division and libdivide on Apple M1 and Intel AVX512
libdivide is fish ’s library for speeding up integer division by runtime constants. It works by replacing divide instructions with cheaper multiplications and shifts.
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OS X sudoers exploit found in the wild
Last month's discovery of a zero-day vulnerability in OS X led to today's revelation of the first known exploit.
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"<ESC>[31M"? ANSI Terminal security in 2023 and finding 10 CVEs
This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities…
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Running Nomad for a Home Server
Setting up a single node Nomad and Consul server to deploy self hosted workloads.
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Serverless: Cold Start War
Comparison of cold start statistics for FaaS across AWS, Azure and GCP