211
Hacking the Postgres wire protocol
Inside PgDog's wire protocol handling: parsing simple and extended messages, using pg_query for AST inspection, and routing queries via the Postgres hash partition function.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
212
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…
213
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?
214
Making Postgres scale
A war story of manually sharding Postgres across 6 databases under load, and the case for automating the process with a proxy instead of weeks of engineering effort.
215
Corrosion
Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.
216
ESP32 Undocumented Bluetooth Commands: Clearing the Air
The developer resources in just one place!
217
Optimizing ClickHouse for Intel's ultra-high core count processors
Intel's latest processor generations are pushing the number of cores in a server to unprecedented levels. For analytical databases like ClickHouse, ultra-high core counts represent a huge opportunity and a complex challenge.
218
Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core
Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version .
219
A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec
What happens when you give a distributed SQL engine a trillion-row dataset? GizmoEdge crushed the Coiled challenge with a 1,000-worker cluster on Azure.
220
UA 1093
On Thursday, 16 October, Foreign Object Debris (FOD) struck the windshield of UA1093, a 737 MAX aircraft, at approximately 36,000 ft. WindBorne began investigating…
221
222
Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
This post investigates how we got from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
223
Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs
My attempt to create fast and cheap bulk storage by caching HDDs with SSDs on Linux, using standard lvmcache. Contains an introduction to LVM, RAID, and partitioning.
224
SIMD-friendly algorithms for substring searching (2016)
Popular programming languages provide methods or functions which locate a substring in a given string. In C it is the function strstr , the C++ class std::string has the method find , Python's string has methods pos and index , and so on, so forth. All these APIs were designed for one-shot searches . During past…
225
Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
226
An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages
Musings on the representation, propagation and handling of errors in existing programming languages, as well as thoughts on future systems. (15K+ words)
227
Safe zero-copy operations in C#
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
228
A fast, growable array with stable pointers in C
My last article about generic data structures in C was written to set the stage for today’s topic: A data structure with constant time indexing, stable pointers, and works well with arena allocators. Its been independently discovered by multiple programmers over the years and so goes by different names. A 2001 paper…
229
230
Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
231
Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
232
Building a Linux Container Runtime from Scratch
We're open sourcing our programmatic low-level container runtime, Styrolite
233
Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?
Welcome to LTT Labs - your go-to destination for all things tech. Explore comprehensive test results, insightful commentary, and the latest analysis in hardware.
234
Huge Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
235
Processing Strings 109x Faster Than Nvidia on H100
StringZilla v4 brings CUDA acceleration for string processing: 109x faster than Nvidia's CuDF on edit distances, plus 52-bit MinHash fingerprinting and AES-based hashing.
236
Machine Code Isn't Scary
Machine code isn't scary. If you can make sure your JSON conforms to a JSON schema, you can write machine code.
237
Linux Capabilities Revisited
Technical blog by Stephan Berger (@malmoeb)
238
Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms
Dissecting various compression algorithms.
239
Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock
oddlama's personal web page and blog
240
Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…