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OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 553 posts.
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Speeding Up the Webcola Graph Viz Library with Rust and WebAssembly
For a recent project I've been working on, I wanted to include a graph showing the relationships between different artists on Spotify. Spotify provides the data directly from their API, and I had everything set up to pull it for a user's top artists and into the browser.
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Understanding Connections and Pools
What connections are, how they affect our systems, and how and why pooling works.
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Best practices can slow your application down
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
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The QOI File Format Specification
Last month I announced a toy project called QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression.
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Fun with Unix domain sockets
A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets. This started out as a feature request from Aslak Raanes: #1388: Serve using UNIX …
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PostgreSQL, Memory and the Cloud
This post explains how Linux memory overcommit and OOM-killer behavior can turn a single runaway query into a full PostgreSQL crash, and why many managed cloud database services fail to disable overcommit the way self-hosted PostgreSQL recommends.
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Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
This blog post describes the optimizations enabled by -ffast-math when compiling C or C++ code with GCC 11 for x86_64 Linux (other languages/operating systems/CPU architectures may enable slightly different optimizations).
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Wasmer 2.0
It's been almost 6-months since we released Wasmer 1.0, and the community support and reception were incredible. Since then, we've been hard at work on the next version of Wasmer.
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Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with one weird trick
As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark …
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PostgreSQL on ARM-Based AWS EC2 Instances
With the second gen of Graviton2 instances announced, we decided to take a look at the price/performance from the standpoint of running PostgreSQL.
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I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
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The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
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How Microsoft reduced Windows 11 update size by 40%
Reducing update size is important to you, and to us. Explore the techniques we used in Windows 11.
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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
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When static makes your C code 10 times faster
Addendum : Many Hacker News commenters correctly point out that the right way to indicate to the compiler that a value does not change is const . This post is not about C best practices, but just about how one can easily get to the bottom of this kind of surprising behavior by looking at the compiler output. This…
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The Wendelstein 7-X concept proves its efficiency
One of the most important optimisation goals underlying the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald has now been confirmed. An analysis by IPP scientists in the journal Nature shows: In the optimised magnetic field cage, the energy losses of the plasma are reduced in the…
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Some Reasons to Measure
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse , keyboard , terminal and…
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External boot disks still don’t work properly with M1 Macs
Making an external bootable SSD for an M1 Mac has proved tricky. Has this changed in macOS 11.2? If you’ve already got 11.1 running on one, how do you update it to 11.2?
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The Rust compiler has gotten faster again
I worked on Rust part-time for several years at Mozilla. During that period I regularly summarized how the compiler’s performance had improved. For example: 2017-11-12 to 2019-07-24.
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Essential security for Linux servers (2013)
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MirkoPC – a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered computer made in Poland
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…