High-Performance Packet Filtering with Pflua
wingolog: article: high-performance packet filtering with pflua
The Offline Cookbook: caching and serving offline-first
Update: Together with Udacity I created a free offline-first interactive course . It involves taking an online-only site to full offline-first glory. Many of the patterns in this article are used.
Glacier redux
by Robin Harris | Wednesday, April 30, 2014 | Architecture , Cloud computing & storage , Object storage | 14 comments
OS X 10.9.3 Is Toxic
OS X 10.9.3 Recurring Panics
Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines
For years, the primary bottleneck for virtual machine based development environments with Vagrant has been filesystem performance. CPU differences are minimal and barely noticeable, and RAM only becomes an issue when many virtual machines are active.
Microservices
Defining the microservices architectural style by describing their nine common characteristics
Sometimes Kill -9 Isn't Enough
If there’s one thing to know about distributed systems, it’s that they have to be designed with the expectation of failure. It’s also safe to say that most software these days is, in some form, distributed—whether it’s a database, mobile app, or enterprise SaaS. If you have two different processes talking to each…
The Move from Linux to FreeBSD
About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes.That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes [...]
Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile memory
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs . What's that about?
Go’s runtime C to Go rewrite, by the numbers
The start of September brings a close to the Go 1.4 merge window . From now until the release in December, only bug fixes and tweaks will be accepted.
On the Computational Complexity of MapReduce
I recently wrapped up a fun paper with my coauthors Ben Fish, Adam Lelkes, Lev Reyzin, and Gyorgy Turan in which we analyzed the computational complexity of a model of the popular MapReduce framework. Check out the preprint on the arXiv. Update: this paper is now published in the proceedings of DISC2015. As usual I’ll…
Developing Service Oriented Architectures
Having spent the last four years rolling out a handful of service oriented architectures, some lessons are finally coming together, and this is an attempt at documenting them.
The C10K problem
It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now.
Hidden Costs of Memory Allocation
It’s important to understand the cost of memory allocations, but this cost can be surprisingly tricky to measure. It seems reasonable to measure this cost by wrapping calls to new[] and delet…
X86 boot sector written in C (2010)
Writing an MS-DOS-compatible boot sector in C: parsing the FAT BIOS parameter block, finding IO.SYS, and loading it via BIOS INT 13h in real mode.
Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
What's wrong with systemd
So many weird little demands on time, mostly spinning out of the Signal groups set up to counter ICE and now being used for general community stuff.
Formal Methods in Building Robust Distributed Systems
We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising…
What “technical” concerns do I have with systemd?
I’ve done a lot of tweeting about systemd lately. My internal conscience constantly reminds me of John Allspaw saying that twitter is just pretty much perfect for snarky comments (paraphrase).
Secrets of dispatch_once; x86 performance trickery
Reader Paul Kim pointed out an entry on Michael Tsai's blog about making dispatch_once fast . While the comment in the dispatch_once source code is fascinating and informative, it doesn't quite delve into the detail that some would like to see. Since this is one of my favorite hacks, for today's article I'm going to…