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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

Any year
2354

Use fast data algorithms (2021)

As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…

2356

Unix recovery legend

It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…

2357

Ode to the M1

It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.

2359

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…

2365

The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Peering into the crystal ball Kubernetes as a technology has been very important to my career this year, and will be even more so for next year…

2367

A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?

The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…