OpenBSD 5.8 released
OpenBSD 5.8
Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS
My colleague Mingxue Zhao sent me a guest post designed to make sure that you are aware of an important time / clock issue. Note: This post was first published on May 18, 2015. We made some important additions and corrections on May 25, 2015. — Jeff; The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) […]
Node.js running in the new Airbus A350 inflight servers
A couple of months ago Finnair announced the launch of the new A350 aircraft, making it the first European airline to start operating the model. We are
Migrating bajillions of database records at Stripe
There are roughly ten thousand bajillion (to the nearest bajillion) merchants registered with Stripe. We recently finished a Very Big Migration of Large Amounts Of Data between several database tables for every single one of them, without losing any of it, without any downtime, mis-reads or mis-writes, whilst running…
Coding for SSDs
Translations: This article was translated to Simplified Chinese by Xiong Duo and to Korean by Matt Lee (이 성욱). Introduction I want to make solid-state drives (SSDs) the optimal storage solution for my key-value store project. For that reason, I had to make sure I fully understood how SSDs work, so that I can optimize
Auto Recovery for Amazon EC2
An important rule when building a highly available and highly reliable system is to design for failure. In other words, your design model should assume that, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has said, “everything fails all the time.” Fortunately, modern data centers, networks, and servers are highly reliable, and failures…
Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3
As of last nightly (2015-07-23), Firefox for Linux is using Gtk+3 instead of Gtk+2.
PyPy warmup improvements
Hello everyone! I'm very pleased to announce that we've just managed to merge the optresult branch. Under this cryptic name is the bigges...
Pgsql: Create an infrastructure for parallel computation in PostgreSQL
Create an infrastructure for parallel computation in PostgreSQL. This does four basic things. First, it provides convenience routines to coordinate …
Unix is not an acceptable Unix
The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?
Notes from Facebook's Developer Infrastructure at Scale F8 Talk
Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects. It's rare to see a company…
Erlang/OTP architectures: Cowboy
Cowboy is the most popular Erlang framework for writing web servers. It is really impressive to see what cowboy accomplishes with such…
84% of a single-threaded 1KB write in Redis is spent in the kernel
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
Branchless code sequences
David Thomas's website.
Building a lower-latency GC
We’ve been doing a bunch of work recently on improving the responsiveness of OCaml’s garbage collector. I thought it would be worth discussing these developm...
Security: OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD
Blog about network and security, showing example of Linux iptables and Snort configuration, and Windows security softwares.
System design implications of declining network latency vs. disk latency
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array.
Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way We Think
Customers ask us for p99 (99th percentile) of metrics pretty frequently. We plan to add such a feature to Database Performance Monitor (DPM)(more on that later). But a lot of the time, when customers make this request, they have something very specific, and different, ...
Running Rust on the Rumprun Unikernel
The Rust programming language has been able to run on bare-metal without the standard library for quite some while now. However, most Rust applications depend on the std crate, and therefore still need a full operating system to run.
MariaDB 10.1 can do 1M queries per second
MariaDB 10.1 not only contains tons of new features, it has also been polished to deliver top performance. The biggest improvement has been achieved for scalability on massively multithreaded hardware. The following numbers show the throughput for a simplified sysbench OLTP benchmark on MariaDB-10.1.8 compared to…