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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

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1748

Things Unix can do atomically (2010)

Richard Crowley2026257 points212 commentscited by 5 details

This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.

1749

A fork() in the road

Microsoft2019257 points178 commentscited by 3 details

The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]

1751

Against /tmp

Tony Finch2024257 points159 comments details

I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea , which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems.

1759

What async promised and what it delivered

Causality2026256 points307 comments details

The async/await saga is a story where each chapter solves the previous chapter's worst problem while introducing new structural costs. The sequential syntax that made async code readable also obscures the thing that matters: which operations actually depend on each other.

1760

ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark

Daniel Lemire2020256 points212 commentscited by 3 details

In my previous blog post, I compared the performance of my new ARM-based MacBook Pro with my 2017 Intel-based MacBook Pro. I used a number parsing benchmark. In some cases, the ARM-based MacBook Pro was nearly twice as fast as the older Intel-based MacBook Pro. I think that the Apple M1 processor is a breakthrough ……

1762

Disasters I've seen in a microservices world

João Alves2021256 points140 comments details

When Martin Fowler's post about microservices came out in 2014, the teams where I worked were already building service-oriented architectures. That post and the subsequent hype made their way into almost every software team in the world. The "Netflix OSS stack" was the coolest thing back then, allowing engineers…

1763

It Is Never a Compiler Bug Until It Is

Russell O'Connor2020256 points132 commentscited by 4 details

Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…

1766

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS servers and phased apt updates

Chris Siebenmann2023256 points111 comments details

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…

1768

The DynamoDB Paper

Marc Brooker2022256 points91 comments details

This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.