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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 458 posts.

2018
186

Modern Linux in an ancient PC

What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…

193

Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability

There is a lot of righteous anger directed toward Intel over CPU bugs that were revealed by Spectre/Meltdown. I agree that things could have been handled better, particularly with regards to transparency and the sharing of information among the relevant user communities that could have worked together to deploy…

195

Modeling Message Queues in TLA+

I recently did a corporate TLA+ workshop and some people asked what TLA+ specs look like in practice. If you looked at the most common public examples, you’d probably come away thinking that people only used it for critical consensus algorithms. This is a problem for two reasons: first, it makes it harder to learn…

197

Speeding Up Ruby with Shared Strings

It’s not often I am able to write a patch that not only reduces memory usage, but increases speed as well. Usually I find myself trading memory for speed, so it’s a real treat when I can improve both in one patch. Today I want to talk about the patch I submitted to Ruby in this ticket. It decreases “after boot” memory…

198

How to drop 10M packets per second

Internally our DDoS mitigation team is sometimes called "the packet droppers". When other teams build exciting products to do smart things with the traffic that passed through our network, we take joy in discovering novel ways of discarding it.

202

How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…

205

AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions

Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…