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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
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Why we built yet another Postgres connection pooler
PgDog is a connection pooler, load balancer, and sharding proxy for PostgreSQL. Scale Postgres horizontally without rewriting your application.
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Epoll vs. io_uring in Linux
First, I want to tell you how exactly I got to this point and why I started researching different options for handling asynchronous I/O on Linux… Last year, my students and I built a reverse proxy server called TinyGate. It was super simple, worker-based, and it basically worked well. Of course, I didn’t expect it to…
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Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap
Go 1.26 made Green Tea the default GC. We observe its cache-friendliness with perf, visualize the heap to see how Go allocates, and poke at a sparse-page problem a non-moving collector like Go's struggles with.
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WASI 0.3
WASI 0.3 is official, and async is now native to WebAssembly Components. The WASI Subgroup voted to ratify WASI 0.3.0, rebasing WASI onto the WebAssembly Component Model’s async primitives. The 0.3.0 specification is now stable, and runt...
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SQLite in Production: Optimizing WAL Mode, Concurrency, and VFS Layers
Transitioning SQLite from a local development tool to a production-grade database requires a deep understanding of its internal mechanics. This article explores how to tune WAL mode, manage busy handlers, and leverage custom Virtual File System (VFS) layers to achieve ultra-low latency.
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Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
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.
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What async promised and what it delivered
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.
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First steps in bare-metal programming using UEFI
A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.
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Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
Cloudflare Research is building a global consensus service called Meerkat that uses a new consensus algorithm called QuePaxa. We plan to use Meerkat to build a strongly consistent, fault-tolerant key-value store, and other applications.
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Rust’s Standard Library on the GPU
GPU code can now use Rust's standard library. We share the implementation approach and what this unlocks for GPU programming.
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The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
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Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
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Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
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Making Tailscale Faster
Tailscale performance updates reduce memory use, increase throughput, and speed startup with multi-queue, writev, and netmap caching.
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Principles for Fast Tokio Applications
A microscope for Tokio and Rust applications
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FFmpeg 101 (2024)
A high-level architecture overview to start with FFmpeg.
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Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel
We have published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) 118: Dom0 arbitrary code execution in qvm-copy-to-vm error reporting. The text of this QSB and its accompanying cryptographic signatures are reproduced below, followed by a general explanation of this announcement and authentication instru...
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What is malloc doing, anyway?
malloc has a very nice and simple interface: you ask for a certain amount of memory, and you’re given a void pointer to your block of contiguous bytes that’s been magicked into existence. Once you’re done with it, you call free with the same pointer and the memory disappears into the ether.
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Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
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WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
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Linux is an interpreter
And why you would want to exec a cpio
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Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
I stopped working on the reverse-engineered Apple Neural Engine (ANE) driver three years ago, upon a sad mini realization that the ANE block is just not that useful, and I could be doing more useful things, and moved onto upstreaming other, more useful, blocks. The ANE's architecture was too opinionated to build a…
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GitHub's new Git storage architecture
GitHub's new Git storage architecture is built so thousands of agents can push to a single repository at once. Here's how it works.
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Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
macOS Internals Deep Dive Building a Development Kernel Collection Configuring our Mac to boot the Development Kernel Collection Putting our machine to work! When did Apple grace us with this feature? Undoing our work for OS updates Closing Thoughts
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My first patch to the Linux kernel
How an undefined behavior in C made me pull my hair out for days but became my first patch to the Linux kernel!