2221
Paper review: IPFS – Content addressed, versioned, P2P file system
This week we discussed the IPFS whitepaper by Juan Benet in my Distributed Systems Seminar. Remember peer-to-peer systems? IPFS is "pe...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
2222
Firefox finally plugs the leak
Leaky add-ons are a big problem, but there’s been lots of action relating to them recently. What follows is a summary of the situation and a request for help from currently Nightly testers who use add-ons.
2223
Parsing time stamps faster with SIMD instructions
In software, it is common to represent time as a time-stamp string. It is usually specified by a time format string. Some standards use the format %Y%m%d%H%M%S meaning that we print the year, the month, the day, the hours, the minutes and the seconds. The current time as I write this blog post would be … Continue…
2224
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…
2225
A terminal case of Linux
Has this ever happened to you? You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff. That’s a useless use of cat. …oh hey cool bear....
2226
When Bloom filters don't bloom
Last month finally I had an opportunity to use Bloom filters. I became fascinated with the promise of this data structure, but I quickly realized it had some drawbacks. This blog post is the tale of my brief love affair with Bloom filters.
2227
Supercharging the Git Commit Graph
Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of
2228
2229
The Mythical IO-Bound Rails App
When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency to make your service scale. But how true is this in general?
2230
2021 GPS Accuracy Issue Impacting Some Garmin, Suunto, other GPS Devices
Update: As of Sunday morn...
2231
Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux's initial Git commit
Or, how to break all the tools that parse the "Fixes:" tag Kees Cook There was a recent discussion about how Linux's "Fixes" tag, which ...
2232
Troubleshooting: Terminal Lag
I think I should blog more about random troubleshooting sessions, if nothing else it will remind me what steps I took when it inevitably happens again!
2233
Truly Seamless Reloads with HAProxy
What users often call a “seamless” or “hitless” reload is a configuration update or a service upgrade performed with no impact on user experience.
2234
How you could have come up with Paxos yourself
In the field of computer science, the Paxos algorithm is notorious for how difficult it is to understand. I had to learn the Paxos algorithm in my distributed systems class. I even have "implemented" it by translating Leslie Lamport's TLA+ to Python. But I didn't understand it until much much later.
2235
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.
2236
Why Oxide Chose Illumos
Servers in the Oxide Rack will form the backbone of both the compute and storage services available to customers. The rack will be composed of a variety of hardware and software components, some of which represent resource-constrained or inflexible environments; e.g., the Service Processor (SP) or Hardware Root Of…
2237
State Considered Harmful – A Proposal for a Stateless Laptop
Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of varioussecurity-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picturepainted in the paper...
2238
MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3
In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…
2239
Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning
tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon. My quest for…
2240
ReactOS Updates
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
2241
We improved the performance of a userspace TCP stack in Go
Learn how we enhanced TCP performance in Coder to achieve 5X faster throughput by optimizing buffer sizes, implementing the HyStart algorithm, and minimizing packet loss, significantly improving remote development experiences.
2242
Linux, macOS, and Windows running simultaneously on a first gen Core i5
This is my main computer, a Thinkpad T410 with a 1st generation Intel Core i5 and 8 GB of RAM. It runs Arch Linux with Xfce.
2243
2244
Crouching T2, Hidden Danger
Let’s talk about that thing nobody’s talking about. Let’s talk about a vulnerability that’s exposing 2018-2020 Macs while most are declining to act nor report about the matter. Oh, and did I mention it’s unpatchable?
2245
“csinc”, the AArch64 instruction you didn’t know you wanted
After a long time of not publishing anything and being passive about doing any writing in this blog, I am coming back for … however many articles I can. Today I want to talk about an underrat…
2246
Haiku booting in UEFI mode
As some may have noticed, my UEFI branch got merged in November, purely by accident too! However, until now, we still haven't been able to boot to the desktop. Whilst still in development, the addition of a simple framebuffer driver and a crucial fix …
2247
2248
Xhyve – Lightweight Virtualization on OS X Based on Bhyve
The Hypervisor.framework user mode virtualization API introduced in Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) cannot only be used for toy projects like the hvdos DOS Emulator, but is full-featured enough to support a full virtualization solution that can for example run Linux.
2249
GitHub's new Git storage architecture
GitHub's new Git storage architecture is built so thousands of agents can push to a single repository at once. Here's how it works.
2250
FreeBSD Jails Containers
FreeBSD networking and containers (Jails) stacks are very mature and provide lots of useful features … yet for some reason these features are not properly advertised by the FreeBSD project &#…