151
Moving towards a faster web
Speed has been one of Chrome’s core principles since the beginning - we’re constantly working to give users an experience that is instant a...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
152
Mistakes we made adopting event sourcing and how we recovered
Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement. — Fred Brooks
153
A Look at PureDarwin – An OS Based on the Open Source Core of macOS
An overview of the PureDarwin project, which is a community effort to produce a more usable version of Darwin OS, the open source base behind modern Mac OS.
154
When TCP sockets refuse to die
While working on our Spectrum server , we noticed something weird: the TCP sockets which we thought should have been closed were lingering around. We realized we don't really understand when TCP sockets are supposed to time out!
155
Books: an immutable double-entry accounting database service
Tracking financial transactions at scale
156
Anatomy of an ELF executable
Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…
157
Files Are Fraught with Peril
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
158
Raspberry Pi 4 as a USB-C peripheral
I’ve previously blogged about using Pi Zero (and Zero W) devices as USB Gadgets. This allows them to be powered and accessed via one of the micro USB sockets and it shows up as both a CD-Driv…
159
Technical Challenges Developing a Distributed SQL Database
Here is an outline of some of architectural issues addressed as we build YugabyteDB, our high-performance distributed SQL database.
160
Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
161
OCaml on Baremetal Shakti RISC-V Processor
It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group , we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extensions of the open-source Shakti RISC-V processor ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, my language of choice to build the…
162
Splitting atoms in XNU
Posted by Ian Beer, Google Project ZeroTL;DRA locking bug in the XNU virtual memory subsystem all...
163
Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
We launched the first generation (A1) of Arm-based, Graviton-powered EC2 instances at re:Invent 2018. Since that launch, thousands of our customers have used them to run many different types of scale-out workloads including containerized microservices, web servers, and data/log processing. The Operating System Vendors…
164
Who has the fastest website in F1?
I was trying to make my predictions for the new Formula One season by studying the aerodynamics of the cars, their cornering speeds, their ability to run with different amounts of fuel. Then it hit me: I have no idea what I'm doing.
165
Beginner's Guide to Linkers (2010)
This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to…
166
PyPy for low-latency systems
PyPy for low-latency systems Recently I have merged the gc-disable branch, introducing a couple of features which are useful when you need...
167
How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
168
169
How much faster is Redis at storing a blob of JSON compared to Postgres?
tl;dr; Redis is 16 times faster at reading these JSON blobs.*
170
171
Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina
A bundle called IncompatibleAppsList.bundle found in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/ in macOS Catalina contains a of list of 235 apps that are incompatible with Catalina.
172
173
Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
174
Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines
Canonical log lines are a lightweight, flexible, and technology-agnostic technique for observability that are powerful and easy to implement.
175
Learning from OpenBSD can make computers marginally less horrible
The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…
176
177
Fsyncgate: Errors on fsync are unrecoverable (2018)
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
178
OpenBSD: Why and How (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
179
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy Hellerstein & Alvaro, arXiv 2019 The CALM conjecture (and later theorem) was first introduced to the world in a 2010 keynote talk at PODS. Beh…
180
