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

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1869

PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks

Pawel Urbanek2022249 points41 comments details

PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.

1873

Why bother with argv[0]?

Wietze Beukema2024248 points259 comments details

The first argument of a program’s command line, typically reflecting the program’s name/path and often referred to as argv[0], can in most cases be set to an arbitrary value without affecting the process’ flow. Making the case against argv[0], this post demonstrates how it can be used to deceive security analysts…

1878

Making Rust binaries smaller by default

Jakub Beránek2024248 points194 commentscited by 5 details

Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.

1879

The compositor is evil

Raph Levien2020248 points175 commentscited by 3 details

First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…