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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 278 posts.

2014
7

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

[Update: Wladimir Palant has posted a response on the AdBlock Plus blog. Also, a Chrome developer using the handle “Klathmon” has posted numerous good comments in the Reddit discussion of this post , explaining why ad-blockers are inherently CPU- and memory-intensive, and why integrating ad-blocking into a browser…

10

John Carmack on Inlined Code

The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…

14

The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

I've been using 802.11 on Linux now for over a decade, and to be honest, it's still a pretty sad experience. It works well enough that I mostly don't care... but when I care, and try to dig deeper, it always ends up in the answer “this is just crap”.

21

AWS EC2 Container Service

Earlier this year I wrote about container computing and enumerated some of the benefits that you get when you use it as the basis for a distributed application platform: consistency &amp fidelity, development efficiency, and operational efficiency. Because containers are lighter in weight and have less memory and…

24

The Lost Art of C Structure Packing

This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.

28

I/O Thoughts

This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...