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How Firefox Got Fast Again
Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force ...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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The web sucks if you have a slow connection
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were…
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The largest Git repo
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
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Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank
The Firefox Quantum release is getting close. It brings many performance improvements, including the super fast CSS engine that we brought over from Servo. But there’s another big piece of ...
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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
[Jan 26, 7:25am]: Google has responded to this article and the plans for throttling: Unfortunately, our current implementation throttles...
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How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Keyboard latency
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
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Why PS4 downloads are so slow
PS4 downloads have a reputation of being very slow. I did some digging to find out the root cause, and was surprised.
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The world in which IPv6 was a good design
. It took a look longer to read the book than to play this little web game, but you get pretty much the same thing out of the game, so I hig...
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Inside a fast CSS engine
Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...
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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
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Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
Hello everyone The Python community has been discussing removing the Global Interpreter Lock for a long time. There have been various atte...
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How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
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HolyJit: A New Hope
tl;dr: We believe there is a safer and easier way of writing a Jit. Current State Today, all browsers’ Jits share a similar design. This ...
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Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
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SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem
SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().
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Computer latency: 1977-2017
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
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I found a bug in Intel Skylake processors
Instructors of “Introduction to programming” courses know that students are willing to blame the failures of their programs on anything. Sorting routine discards half of the data? “That might be a Windows virus!” Binary search always fails? “The Java compiler is acting funny today!” More experienced programmers know…
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The JVM is not that heavy
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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AWS Fargate – Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure
Containers are a powerful way for developers to develop, package, and deploy their applications. At AWS we have over a hundred thousand active ECS clusters and hundreds of millions of new containers started each week. That’s 400+% customer growth since 2016. Container orchestration solutions, like Amazon Elastic…
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