2131
XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
Somehow xor became the most popular version.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
2132
Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
We launched the first generation (A1) of Arm-based, Graviton-powered EC2 instances at re:Invent 2018. Since that launch, thousands of our customers have used them to run many different types of scale-out workloads including containerized microservices, web servers, and data/log processing. The Operating System Vendors…
2133
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...
2134
macOS updates for Apple Silicon Macs are larger than reported
Why some report macOS updates as being more than 1 GB smaller than the figures given here. Don’t believe the size given by softwareupdate.
2135
Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
A whirlwind tour through the bucket-load of fail that is Urbit.
2136
Please grow your buffers exponentially
If you record every heap allocation and re-allocation done by Firefox you find some interesting things. In particular, you find some sub-optimal buffer growth strategies that cause a lot of heap churn.
2137
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.
2138
This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now
From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share where all this caching is going to live as we just installed it at the hosting ce…
2139
A QUIC update on Google’s experimental transport
Last year we announced QUIC , a UDP-based transport protocol for the modern Internet. Over the last quarter, we’ve been increasing the amo...
2140
C++ containers that save memory and time
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
2141
Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks (2019)
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
2142
Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster?
For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained…
2143
Low Cost EC2 Instances With Burstable Performance
Even though the speedometer in my car maxes out at 150 MPH, I rarely drive at that speed (and the top end may be more optimistic than realistic), but it is certainly nice to have the option to do so when the time and the circumstances are right. Most of the time I am using […]
2144
Jepsen: MongoDB 3.6.4
MongoDB is a long-time user of Jepsen . Over the past three years, Jepsen has performed several analyses for MongoDB, and MongoDB has integrated an expansive Jepsen test suite into their CI system. In March, MongoDB requested Jepsen perform an analysis on a previously untested configuration: sharded clusters. We also…
2145
Tearing apart printf()
How does printf work behind the scenes
2146
Using the most unhinged AVX-512 instruction to make fastest phrase search algo
Disclaimers before we start For those who don’t want to read/don’t care that much, here are the results. I hope after seeing them you are compelled to read. TL;DR: I wrote a super fast phrase search algorithm using AVX-512 and achieved wins up to 1600x the performance of Meilisearch. The source code can be found here…
2147
ReactOS 0.4.9 released
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
2148
Caching Beyond RAM: The Case for NVMe
memcached
2149
Practices of Reliable Software Design
It should have good performance and be able to hold many entries. Reads are more common than writes. I know how I would do it already, but I’m curious about your approach.
2150
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 ...
2151
Is Your VirtualBox Reading Your E-Mail? Reconstruction of FrameBuffers from VRAM
This document describes a method of reading and displaying previously used framebuffers from a variety of popular graphics cards. In all 4 tested laptops the content of the VRAM was not erased upon reboot. It is also possible to show that the content of the host VRAM can be accessed from a VirtualBox guest, thereby…
2152
Call me maybe: RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
2153
The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition
Posted by Chris Evans, Exploit Writer Underling to Tavis OrmandyBack in this 1998 post to the Bug...
2154
2155
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...
2156
Keep the monolith, but split the workloads
Everybody loves a monolith, but you can hit issues as you scale. Learn how splitting workloads can improve your monolithic architecture's performance and scalability, and understand the trade-offs between monolithic systems and microservices.
2157
Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2011
Laurent Le Brun's blog
2158
Copying data is wasteful, mutating data is dangerous
Copying data wastes memory, and modifying/mutating data can lead to bugs. Learn how to implement a compromise between the two in Python: hidden mutability.
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SSH as a Sudo Replacement
A major caveat in tools like sudo and doas for that matter is that they rely on setuid binaries and privilege escalation in order to run commands as root.