181
Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower
Keeping workflow state and application data in the same Postgres database lets one transaction update both, simplifying idempotency and atomicity.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
182
XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
Somehow xor became the most popular version.
183
Everything old is new again: memory optimization
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
184
Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
Inside our performance sprint: the benchmarks Claude built, the loop each Slack thread ran, and the guardrails that let us ship 3,000 changes safely.
185
Running MicroVMs in Proxmox VE, the Easy Way
I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently ...
186
Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
KO | EN | Discussions on HN I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.6...
187
5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs
See how Netlify rebuilt Edge Functions on MicroVMs to deliver lower latency, greater reliability, and faster log delivery.
188
What changes when you turn a Linux box into a router
I think it is incredibly cool that we can change a Linux system into a networking device. But have you ever wondered:
189
Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?
The AI surge has DRAM producers like Micron focus on HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) to serve AI hyperscalers over the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) used by ordinary consumers and small businesses. Consequently, for instance, servers which used to cost $2500 on Newegg now cost $5000. RAM alone is $2500 now.
190
Java is fast, code might not be
Fixing common Java anti-patterns took an app from 1,198ms to 239ms. Eight patterns that compile fine and pass code review but silently drain CPU and balloon heap, with benchmarks and code fixes for each
191
A big win for Android interoperability
Google gatekept key Android features, and the European Commission asked what we thought about it. Now Alphabet must open 11 Android features to all.
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Async/Await on the GPU
GPU code can now use Rust's async/await. We share the reasons why and what this unlocks for GPU programming.
194
WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter
A Game Boy emulator runs faster than a native interpreter by dynamically recompiling SM83 to WebAssembly, effectively making JIT possible on iOS.
195
P99 0 ms* autocomplete for 240M domain names
How Wirewiki's domain-name autocomplete renders suggestions next frame for 99% of keystrokes.
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macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
198
Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
199
Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system. It was prepared by a technical Expert Panel of 49 members, including…
200
Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup. | Reading time: 15 min read
201
Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Query Hints
Postgres 19 brings plan advice: the query hints the Postgres community held off on for 15 years. Shaun Thomas covers the 15-year debate, pg_plan_advice, pg_stash_advice, and how to use them.
202
Back to FreeBSD: Part 1
Containers ran in production on FreeBSD thirteen years before Docker. So why does nobody talk about it?
203
Rust SIMD on the GPU
At VectorWare , we are building the first GPU-native software company . Today, we are excited to announce that we can successfully use Rust's portable SIMD ( core::simd ) on the GPU. This milestone marks a significant step towards our vision of enabling developers to write complex, high-performance applications that…
204
Molly guard in reverse
A blog about software craft and quality
205
What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts ( 900P and 905P ). All drives are…
206
Running out of disk space in production
A tale about misconfiguring nginx, from adventures in production
207
Backpressure is all you need
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
208
Real-time LLM Inference on Standard GPUs: 3k tokens/s per request
Today, Kog AI launches a tech preview of the Kog Inference Engine (KIE): 3,000 output tokens/s per request on 8× AMD MI300X GPUs and 2,100 on 8× NVIDIA H200 (FP16, no speculative decoding). This preview runs a 2B model, with support for large third-party MoE models coming next at similar speeds.
209
Consistency diffusion language models: Up to 14x faster, no quality loss
Standard diffusion language models can't use KV caching and need too many refinement steps to be practical. CDLM fixes both with a post-training recipe that enables exact block-wise KV caching and trajectory-consistent step reduction — delivering up to 14.5x latency improvements
210
Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.