2191
Leap seconds: Causing bugs even when they don’t happen
Some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
2192
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.
2193
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:
2194
Why UPS Trucks Rarely Turn Left
UPS engineers map out routes for their drivers consisting of "a series of right-hand loops"
2195
Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?
Differential dataflow is a library that lets you write simple dataflow programs and a) then runs them in parallel and b) efficiently updates the outputs when new inputs arrive. Compared to competition like spark and kafka streams , it can handle more complex computations and provides dramatically better throughput and…
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2197
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…
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2199
Making TRAMP faster
I recently changed jobs and found myself in a position where I would need to do a lot of work on remote machines. Since I am Emacs user, the most common way to do this is using TRAMP (Transparent Remote access, Multiple Protcol). TRAMP is an Emacs package that let’s you treat a remote host like a local system, similar…
2200
Scaling the GitLab database
An in-depth look at the challenges faced when scaling the GitLab database and the solutions we applied to help solve the problems with our database setup.
2201
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
2202
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.
2203
Rwasa – A high-performance web server in x86_64 assembly
rwasa is our full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx . It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years' experience with high volume web environments. In addition to…
2204
The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
2205
Anna: A Fast, Scalable, Flexibly Consistent Key-Value Store
There’s fast and there’s fast. This post is about Anna*, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that’s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unpr…
2206
Making a Postgres query 1k times faster
Learn how we discovered what was slowing down large database queries, and what we did to make Postgres queries 1000x faster.
2207
How Time Series Databases Work, and Where They Don’t
This blog takes a deep dive into the hows and whys of time series databases—and why Honeycomb couldn't be limited to a TSDB implementation.
2208
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.
2209
Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
2210
High-performance .NET by example: Filtering bot traffic
Mistakes and lessons from a real-world feature performance optimizations: from API usage to advanced data structures, from bit hacks to CPU-friendlier code.
2211
Fast enough VMs in fast enough time
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
2212
YJIT is the most memory-efficient Ruby JIT
This year, the YJIT team and I have gotten a paper accepted at MPLR 2023 (Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes), which is now freely available through ACM open access. The paper, titled “Evaluating YJIT’s Performance in a Production Context: A Pragmatic Approach”, goes into details of the strategy taken to…
2213
Every bug/quirk of the Windows resource compiler (rc.exe), probably
Fuzz testing decades-old software can turn up some curious behaviors
2214
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…
2215
AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
2216
2217
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…
2218
Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances
Learn how Stripe uses AWS Reserved Instances and capacity planning to effectively manage a dynamic, scalable cloud infrastructure.
2219
Your "simulation" might not need state
The bouncing DVD logo is a fun and easy coding project. Watching Daniel Shiffman code it in p5.js is one of my earliest programming memories. However, the naive solution is far from optimal.
2220
NetBSD 8.0 released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0, the sixteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.