2011
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
2012
Beyond 10,000 Lines: Lessons Learned from a Large Phoenix Project
Lessons Learned from a Large Phoenix Project
2013
Keeping Netflix Reliable Using Prioritized Load Shedding
How viewers are able to watch their favorite show on Netflix while the infrastructure self-recovers from a system failure
2014
2015
2016
This Is Why They Call It a Weakly-Ordered CPU
On this blog, I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these …
2017
Kernel-hack-drill and exploiting CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel
Some memory corruption bugs are much harder to exploit than others. They can involve race conditions, crash the system, and impose limitations that make a researcher's life difficult. Working with such fragile vulnerabilities demands significant time and effort. CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel is one such hard bug…
2018
Instrumentation: The First Four Things You Measure
Old observability metrics like uptime and MTTR aren't enough anymore. Teams must connect technical signals to business outcomes, like savings and speed.
2019
2020
The Merge
Learn about The Merge, when Ethereum Mainnet moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in September 2022, cutting its energy use by about 99.95%.
2021
2022
Rewriting a large production system in Go
My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go . I say "almost" because one compon...
2023
Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)
JSON output must become the norm for application pipelining. Until then, jc can help.
2024
RIP pthread_cancel
I posted about adding pthread_cancel use in curl about three weeks ago, we released this in curl 8.16.0 and it blew up right in our faces. Now, with #18540 we are ripping it out again. What happened? short recap pthreads define “Cancelation points”, a list of POSIX functions where a pthread may be cancelled. In…
2025
Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
2026
2027
Update on Metro
Earlier this week, I asked our engineering leads and release managers to take the Windows Metro version of Firefox off the trains. The team is solid and did good work, ...
2028
PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements
I recently finished reading PostgreSQL 14 Internals by Egor Rogov. It is one of the great books that teach applied computer science without watering down the difficult parts. One particularly interesting topic is PostgreSQL’s execution of UPDATE statements. Updates in relational databases are inherently complex. They…
2029
The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs
A simple strategy of having LLMs write fuzz tests and build up a port in topological order seems effective at automating porting from C to Rust.
2030
Scalable, Resilient Brainfuck
Building Brainf∗ck interpreter for the 21 century, with all the best systems design practices in mind. Think of Brainf∗ck-as-a-service cloud solution!
2031
Automatically closing FIN_WAIT_2 is a violation of the TCP specification
I was asked to debug another weird issue on our network. Apparently every now and then a connection going through CloudFlare would time out with 522 HTTP error.
2032
Fast Llama 2 on CPUs with Sparse Fine-Tuning and DeepSparse
From live events to hands-on product demos to deep technical research, see what we're doing with AI at Red Hat.
2033
Why Developers Never Use State Machines
Why developers rarely use state machines, seeing them as overkill until it's too late to switch, and what the state_machine gem did for CrowdHired.
2034
WSL2 can now mount Linux ext4 disks directly
If you're on a version of Windows 11 that is build 22000 or greater, you can ...
2035
Fast Rust Builds
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
2036
GNU Guix 1.2.0
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
2037
How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
Code run in a lightweight Virtual Machine can’t take advantage of the Efficiency cores of the host Apple silicon Mac. How then does Sonoma handle its threads?
2038
The logging framework isn't a bottleneck, and other lies your laptop tells you
Your laptop spends all day lying to you. If you want your code to run well on server hardware, best write it on server hardware.
2039
The state of SIMD in Rust in 2025
If you’re already familiar with SIMD, the table is all you need. And if you’re not, you will understand the table by the end of the…
2040
