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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.
There's a fascinating Rust library, loom, which can be used to thoroughly test lock-free data structures. I always wanted to learn how it works. I still do! But recently I accidentally implemented a small toy which, I think, contains some of the loom's ideas, and it seems worthwhile to write about that. The goal here…
On the concepts involved in a running program. What happens, exactly, when you double click an executable file, or launch it from the command line, and it begins to execute?
Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.
We are thrilled to announce the release of **Wasmer 5.0**, the latest milestone in our journey to make WebAssembly the greatest tool for executing softw...
This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distrib...
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%. This goal will be achieved through a high-level design overhaul…
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten asks the founders — Nathan, Max, Antonio — about the data structures at the heart of Zed: Rope and SumTree.
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
Earlier this year, a user at Practical ZFS asked a deceptively simple question: I have a Proxmox pool of three four-wide RAIDz1 vdevs. Whenever my VM is running, all twelve... Read More
https://blog.packagecloud.io/illustrated-guide-monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/
A rack-scale design that drives data center power efficiency.
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
RavenDB is a distributed document database which repeatedly advertises its support for ACID transactions. 1 It’s intended for OLTP workloads, and offers a variety of ETL paths for exporting data to other systems. Its transactional API revolves around a session handle, which “represents a single business transaction on…
Introduction to the Temporal Python SDK and how Temporal is a durable, distributed asyncio event loop
I've been involved in the Rust project in some form or another since 2016, and it's a language I'm very comfortable using. Many Rust programmers could say the same . But, if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we'd admit that the road to getting to that level of comfort was difficult.
This is one of several papers I’ll be reading from 2023’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). If you’d like to receive regular updates as soon as they’re published, check out my newsletter or follow me on the site formerly known as Twitter . Enjoy!
SPI Flash reader built from a Teensy or Arduino
I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targetin…
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
A thought experiment on the winners, losers and new players in a cloud-driven stock, fx and commodity-trading world
With the recent release of Ubuntu 24.04, we at Snyk Security Labs thought it would be interesting to examine the latest version of this Linux distribution to see if we could find any interesting privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
A summary of a Codethink sponsored project which implements a cryptographically secure bootloader, written in Rust, for RISC-V.
SIMD in game development Often in game development we talk about SIMD. It is the holy grail of CPU performance, often out of reach. The conventional wisdom is that it is difficult to achieve real gains from SIMD. It is tempting to build a math library around SIMD hoping to get some performance gains. However, it often…
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two d...
I recently released papaya, a fast and feature-complete concurrent hash table for Rust. In this post I want to dive into the design and research that went into creating it, as well as why you might consider using it over existing solutions.
This document has been assembled to supplement a set of instructions about writing one's own bootloader for the RP2040. Writing a bootloader requires some understanding of the boot sequence, but it became a bit too cumbersome to include that explanation in the bootloader documentation.
