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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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How key-based cache expiration works
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton Doing cache invalidation by hand is an incredibly frustrating and error-prone process. You’re very likely to forget a spot and let stale data get served. That’s enough to turn…
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Memory Safe Context Switching
This document describes how Fil-C supports longjmp , setjmp , setcontext , getcontext , makecontext , and swapcontext in a totally memory-safe way. In particular, no misuse of those APIs in Fil-C can lead to stack corruption or any other violation of Fil-C's capability model.
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Attacking Firecracker: AWS' MicroVM Monitor Written in Rust
Why are more security teams adopting Firecracker? How secure is it, and how suitable is it for your organization? This guide dives into this trending innovation.
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Amazon Aurora: Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, Membership
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18 This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design…
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What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?
Little seems to have changed in CPU cores in M3 chips, if you read reviews. Dig a bit deeper and there are major changes, as explained here.
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Shells are two things
Command languages and scripting languages are and should be different things.
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Austral: A systems language with linear types and capabilities
Introducing a new programming language.
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ECC RAM should be a human right
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
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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…
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Linux Certificate Authority root stores have a too simple view of 'trust'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
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ReactOS 0.4.0 Released
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
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How Compaction Works in Pi
Why compaction is needed for large language models and how Pi implements it
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Zed Decoded: Async Rust
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio explore how we use async Rust in the Zed code base to ensure perfect cooperation with macOS to always maintain responsiveness and high-performance.
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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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Cache Associativity
Consider a strided incrementing loop over an array of size $N=2^{21}$ with a fixed step size of 256:
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WASIX, the Superset of WASI Supporting Threads, Processes and Sockets
Today we are very excited to launch a new initiative that will start shaping the future of WebAssembly on both the browser and the server. WASI was ann...
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Let's Build a 28-Core Raspberry Pi Cluster
I built a 28-core gigabit cluster, Kraken, consisting of 7 Raspberry Pi 3 Model Bs.
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Some Notes About Time
This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.
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Why We Love QUIC and HTTP/3
We're thrilled to be so invested in QUIC, a new transport protocol that is more responsive, secure, and flexible than what the internet uses today. Learn why, straight from our very own Jana Iyengar, one of the editors of the core document.
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