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We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
During COVID we experienced rapid growth in the amount of data we ingest. This post details some of the problems this caused us and how we solved them.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,935 posts.
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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
[German]Brief information, which is already here with me since August 2021, but which I have not yet addressed in the blog. David Xanatos has pointed out to me that Microsoft is refusing to sign…
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Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
Rosetta 2 is remarkably fast when compared to other x86-on-ARM emulators. I’ve spent a little time looking at how it works, out of idle curiosity, and found it to be quite unusual, so I figur…
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The Beauty of Unix Pipelines
Some examples of using unix tools in a pipeline
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How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
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Why modern software is slow
I apologize for this title because there are many things that can make modern software slow. Blindly applying one explanation without a bit of investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cu…
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Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
Hello everyone The Python community has been discussing removing the Global Interpreter Lock for a long time. There have been various atte...
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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
The release of Apple Silicon based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news and some surprises at the machine’s performance.
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The August 17 outage
An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.
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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
Have you ever had to decide between a general purpose tool and one built for a very specific purpose? The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one. Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that […]
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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
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How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
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Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
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Write libraries instead of services, where possible
For any developer with limited resources, this means a library (where viable) can provide the same functionality to the user, at a lower cost to the developer than a service.
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How Browsers Work
This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code. She wrote:
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Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
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A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at Slack
This story describes the technical details of the problems that caused the Slack downtime on May 12th, 2020. To learn more about the process behind incident response for same outage, read Ryan Katkov’s post, “All Hands on Deck”. On May 12, 2020, Slack had our first significant outage in a long time. We published a…
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Improving Firefox stability on Linux
A year ago at Mozilla we started to improve Firefox stability on Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between FOSS.
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
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SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
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HolyJit: A New Hope
tl;dr: We believe there is a safer and easier way of writing a Jit. Current State Today, all browsers’ Jits share a similar design. This ...
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