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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,935 posts.

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157

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that

165

Everyone should know SIMD

SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.

166

Why fastDOOM is fast

During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.

168

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly , but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about…

171

The Unix Magic Poster

I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...

172

Cloud Computing Without Containers

We have a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why.

175

Inside a fast CSS engine

Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...

178

Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System

Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…