181
Microsoft confirms Exchange Year 2022 problem
[German]Exchange servers (on-premises) have had woldwide a Year 2022 problem since January 1 (00:00 UTC), because mails are no longer transported due to a “date error”. Meanwhile…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 582 posts.
182
How SQLite scales read concurrency
Understanding how the write-ahead log turns your scaling up to 11.
183
Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
184
PostgreSQL 14 Internals book – Part II
I’m pleased to announce that Part II of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is available now. This part explores the purpose and design of the buffer cache and explains the need for write-ahead logging. Please download the book freely in PDF. There are three more parts to come, so stay tuned! Thanks to Matthew Daniel…
185
186
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%.
187
188
Hot-code reloading on macOS/arm64 with Zig
Jakub Konka's weblog about programming, game theory, maths, and more.
189
Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die
Privileged ports were a security feature in the days of dumb terminals, in the age of the World Wide Web, they are a security vulnerability.
190
Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
191
Year 2038 problem is still alive and well
Largely because of a single code snippet used by many.
192
Hardening macOS
Quick and easy guide for securing macOS systems, for both laymen and security enthusiasts. Last updated for Golden Gate.
193
194
195
What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
(“This Week in Glean'' is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release ...
196
LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
197
198
Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
199
Founding Uber SRE
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
200
How the clipboard works
Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious.
201
Your computer is a distributed system
Many have observed that today's computers are distributed systems implementing the abstraction of the shared-memory multiprocessor. The wording in the title is from the 2009 paper " Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? ". Some points from that and other sources:
202
Raid-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live
The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group The FreeBSD Foundation funded the project to ensure the completion and release of an easy-to-use and practical application. The project came in under budget…
203
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
204
tolower() in bulk at speed
DNS servers often have to convert DNS names to their canonical lower case form. BIND has to do so a bit more than most because it tries to preserve the case of DNS names rather than canonicalizing them.
205
Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
206
We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
Since the foundation of the first public cloud companies in the early 2000s, they have radically transformed the landscape of the internet…
207
Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
208
The FreeBSD/Firecracker Platform
I started working on this on June 20th mainly out of curiosity: I had heard that Firecracker had PVH boot support (which was in fact mistaken!) and I knew that FreeBSD could boot in PVH mode from Xen, so I wondered just how hard it would be to get FreeBSD up and running. Not impossible, as it turned out, but a bit…
209
WebVM: WASM virtual machine in browser with networking via Tailscale
WebVM, our virtual Linux environment running fully client-side in the browser, now supports networking via Tailscale.
210
Performance Improvements in .NET 7
.NET 7 is fast. Really fast. This post deep-dives into hundreds of performance improvements that contributed to that reality.