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200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
Recently I came across Lunduke post about some mysterious Vendefoul Wolf Linux distribution that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan as base (no systemd(1) here) and XLibre X11 server along with IceWM wind…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
242
Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD
Big fish. Small counter. Root shell.
243
What functional programmers get wrong about systems
Type systems verify properties of programs. Production correctness is a property of systems. The gap between these is where the interesting failures live.
244
PostgreSQL and the OOM killer: Why we use strict memory overcommit
In this blog post, we will explain how strict memory overcommit protects your database from catastrophic OOM (out of memory) kills. We will also share how a one character kernel bug forced us to temporarily disable this setting. Finally, we will explain our heuristic for determining the right memory overcommit limit…
245
Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher speeds. These two versions of…
246
Linux on the Atari Jaguar
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
247
Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary
Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he…
248
Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
249
Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on February 20, 2026. A subset of customers who use Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service saw their routes to the Internet withdrawn via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
250
I made Zig compute 33M satellite positions in 3 seconds
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec. Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagat...
251
Linux kernel security work
Lots of the CVE world seems to focus on “security bugs” but I’ve found that it is not all that well known exactly how the Linux kernel security process works. I gave a talk about this back in 2023 and at other conferences since then, attempting to explain how it works, but I also thought it would be good to explain…
252
hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
253
The Zen of Parallel Programming
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
254
More Molly Guards
A blog about software craft and quality
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Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM
My personal website and blog
256
The Components of Agent Memory
For Claude to learn from experience, it has to decide what’s worth remembering before it knows what’s next. Here’s how “dreaming” helps it organize memory and correct mistakes.
257
I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck
Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
258
Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk
what's a few systemd services in initramfs between friends?
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Your File System Is Already A Graph Database
Karpathy recently posted about using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases — collecting raw sources into a directory, having an LLM “compile” them into a wiki of interlinked markdown …
260
Replacing Protobuf with Rust
Forking pg_query.rs to replace Protobuf with bindgen-generated direct C-to-Rust struct mappings, yielding 5x faster query parsing and 10x faster deparsing in PgDog.
261
The Benchmarkpocalypse
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse.
262
WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access
From DrvFs in WSL 1 to Plan 9 to virtiofs, cross-OS file access in WSL 2 has improved with each generation. A new change gives each virtio device its own dedicated DMA pool, removing the last major contention point on the virtiofs path.
263
Postgres data stored in Parquet on S3: LTAP architecture explained
Almost every traditional database keeps its write-ahead log and data files on one machine's disk, which is the root cause of data loss risk, expensive read replicas and high-availability clones, and analytics queries that drag down transactions.
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Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on storage performance in Postgres, with a local NVMe vs. EBS benchmark and the production setup behind it.
266
Building a Shell
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
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JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals
I’m Sérgio, and I work with Web frontend code. Sometimes I write about it here.
269
Memory Safe Inline Assembly
Since Fil-C 0.685, memory-safe inline assembly is supported on both X86_64 and ARM64.
270
Understanding Traceroute
I never understood how traceroute discovers each hop. Turns out it's a clever TTL trick, and about 80 lines of Rust.