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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Running the Steam Deck’s OS in a virtual machine using QEMU
The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer that runs a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. The machine comes with SteamOS 3 (code name “holo” ), which is in turn based on Arch Linux.
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Raspberry Pi – UASP, Trim, and Boot Performance via USB
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
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EC2 I/O
SentinelOne unifies AI-powered endpoint, cloud, identity, and data protection—enhanced by our Security Data Lake for seamless and efficient cybersecurity.
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M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance
The P cores in the M1 Pro/Max CPU are managed in two groups of four, sparing load on the second group, and distributing it unevenly within each group. Its two E cores outperform the four in the M1 …
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Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
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So We've Got a Memory Leak
A story of finding, understanding, and fixing a memory leak in our Rails app. With graphs and code!
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Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen…
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Yes, the 8086 wanted to be mechanically translatable from the 8080, but
So many addressing modes, so little space.
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Fsyncgate: Errors on fsync are unrecoverable (2018)
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
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Real-time LLM Inference on Standard GPUs: 3k tokens/s per request
Today, Kog AI launches a tech preview of the Kog Inference Engine (KIE): 3,000 output tokens/s per request on 8× AMD MI300X GPUs and 2,100 on 8× NVIDIA H200 (FP16, no speculative decoding). This preview runs a 2B model, with support for large third-party MoE models coming next at similar speeds.
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Consistency diffusion language models: Up to 14x faster, no quality loss
Standard diffusion language models can't use KV caching and need too many refinement steps to be practical. CDLM fixes both with a post-training recipe that enables exact block-wise KV caching and trajectory-consistent step reduction — delivering up to 14.5x latency improvements
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Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
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OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
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SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
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Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles
Quote: Back in 80s, it was possible to calculate the speed of the program just by looking at assembly. Another Quote: keep in mind that these days compilers ...
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Jepsen: Etcd 3.4.3
The etcd key-value store is a distributed system intended for use as a coordination primitive. Like Zookeeper and Consul , etcd stores a small volume of infrequently-updated state ( by default, up to 8 GB ) in a key-value map, and offers strict-serializable reads, writes and micro-transactions across the entire…
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50 days of postmarketOS
We are fed up with Android's endless forks! Fifty days ago I have announced postmarketOS, a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux , which can be installed on smartphones. It avoids Android's bad habit of forking software for every single device (!) entirely by going the other way around and unifying as much as…
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Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the…
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OpenBSD: Why and How (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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ClickHouse Keeper: A ZooKeeper alternative written in C++
Read about why we built a resource-efficient alternative for Zookeeper from scratch in C++, what our next big step with it is, and how you can join the Keeper community.