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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

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2673

How to make Firefox builds 17% faster

In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…

2680

Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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2682

Make your program slower with threads

Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…

2683

Compiler Optimizations are Awesome

Another reason for optimizing compilers: It allows us to write simple and obvious code expecting that the compiler will do the optimization. This both reduces the initial defect count and makes the code more maintainable in the long-run. Note that these are also often the simplest optimizations (e.g. a calculation…

2690

“iCloud Backup”

Last year, I bought my 87-year-old grandfather an iPad 2 to replace the who-knows-what PC that was frustrating him constantly. He only used the PC for email and playing music, so it was a no-brainer.

2694

Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown

The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…

2697

Jepsen: Dgraph 1.1.1

Dgraph is a graph database which aims to provide scalable, highly-available, and snapshot-isolated transactions over a labeled directed graph, while minimizing network communication for performance. Conceptually, Dgraph stores a set of (entity, attribute, value) triples. Entities (also known as subjects), are compact…