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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…
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EC2 Maintenance Update II
I’d like to give you an update on the EC2 Maintenance announcement that I posted last week. Late yesterday (September 30th), we completed a reboot of less than 10% of the EC2 fleet to protect you from any security risks associated with the Xen Security Advisory (XSA-108). This Xen Security Advisory was embargoed until…
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Roshi: a CRDT system for timestamped events
Let’s talk about the stream. The SoundCloud stream represents stuff that’s relevant to you primarily via your social graph, arranged in time order, newest-first. The atom of that data model, an event, is a simple enough thing. Timestamp User who did the thing Identifier of the thing that was done For example, At…
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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).
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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…
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PyPy IO improvements
Hello everyone! We've wrapped up the Warsaw sprint, so I would like to describe some branches which have been recently merged and which i...
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Generational Garbage Collection in Firefox
Generational garbage collection (GGC) has now been enabled in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox 32. GGC is a performance optimization only, and should have no observable effects on script ...
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That WoW server blade
A post by August Lilleaas, published August 08, 2014.
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Nweb: a tiny, safe web server (static pages only)
Manage and support computers, servers, storage systems, operating systems, networking, and more.
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Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks
This post is based on the talk of the same name I gave at the Arrrrcamp conference in Ghent, Belgium on October 2nd, 2014. You can find the slides here and the video recording here .
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Linux 3.17
Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux kernel during the 3.17 development cycle
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Basic Concepts of High Availability Linux
When considering to build a high availability cluster based on Linux, it’s easy to find all kinds of how-to’s explaining the basic tooling and configuration. Most of them forget to explain some of the basic concepts of high availability. In this post I’ll try to explain them. To build a high availability cluster that…
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Linux perf rides the rocket
Kernel Line Tracing: Linux perf Rides the Rocket
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Link-time optimization in GCC, part 3 – LibreOffice
After Firefox , I decided to look into LibreOffice performance with link time optimizations (LTO) and profile feedback (FDO). This post was ...
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ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Zookeeper is an Apache project for providing coordination services to distributed systems. ZooKeeper aims to provide a simple kernel (a fil...
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Call me maybe: MongoDB (2013)
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
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Finite State Entropy - A new breed of entropy coder
In compression theory, the entropy encoding stage is typically the last stage of a compression algorithm, the one where the gains from t...