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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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…
Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale
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Build your own operating system
Ten years ago (around the year 2001) I wrote a simple x86 protected-mode OS just to find out how operating systems work. That was really gr...
Distributed Consensus – How Shared Data Is Stored
If you don’t work in computers, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how data gets stored on computers or in the cloud. I’m…
Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta
We're excited to announce that in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU) due to ship in fall 2017, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will no longer be a
Net 9.0 LINQ Performance Improvements
Understand .NET 9.0 LINQ performance improvements, faster iterator and the usage of Span
Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
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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…
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…
Root cause analysis: significantly elevated error rates on 2019‑07‑10
On 2019-07-10, the Stripe API was severely degraded. Two different database bugs and a configuration change caused a cascading failure over several critical services. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
When AWS Autoscale Doesn’t
Explore technical topics, solutions, and resources for building with Twilio – and beyond.
Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4
For the last couple of years, we have been working with our friends at Igalia to bring Vulkan to the Raspberry Pi 4 platform, and today we're happy to announce that we have achieved Vulkan 1.2 conformance from Khronos.
Searching 20 GB/sec: Systems Engineering Before Algorithms
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“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.
Node.js: Some quick optimization advice
#NodeJS : A quick optimization advice Can you spot the difference between these two files : that can explain a 50% performance gain : If you don’t, it’s normal, you try to read the code …
Golang’s Real-Time GC in Theory and Practice
How the Golang concurrent GC achieves low latencies in real-time systems: a visualization of the algorithm and an empirical comparison with other languages.
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…
Who has the fastest F1 website (2021)
Deep-diving on the load performance of F1 websites.
Improve Git monorepo performance with a file system monitor
Monorepo performance can suffer due to the sheer number of files in your working directory. Git’s new builtin file system monitor makes it easy to speed up monorepo performance.
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…
Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
Investigating a vanishing BIOS on the Fujitsu Lifebook AH532
A few months ago, I got given a laptop with a very interesting condition. The BIOS setup menu was supposedly inaccessible, and nothing apart from the default boot option works. Time to investigate to see what is actually happening and what we can do about it.