Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
252

Tendermint 0.10.2

Tendermint is a server and a protocol for building linearizable (or sequentially consistent) byzantine fault-tolerant applications. Tendermint validators accept transactions from clients over HTTP, and replicate them to the other validators in the cluster, forming a totally ordered sequence of transactions. Each…

255

Research papers in the .NET source

This post is completely inspired by (or ‘copied from’ depending on your point of view) a recent post titled JAVA PAPERS (also see the HackerNews discussion). However, instead of looking at Java and the JVM, I’ll be looking at references to research papers in the .NET language, runtime and compiler source code.

257

Storage engine design

In time-series databases the querying pattern differs from the write pattern. We usually write data in time order by updating many series every second. But querying is a different story. We usually want to read only a handful of series leaving most of the data behind. Here lies the biggest problem, which is we don’t…

259

Using cgroups to limit I/O

Developers running their apps on tsuru can choose plans based on memory and cpu usage. We were looking at adding I/O usage as one of the plan’s features, so one could choose how many I/O operations per second or bytes per second a container may be able to read/write. Being able to limit I/O is particulary important…

262

Disable transparent hugepages

tl;dr “Transparent Hugepages” is a Linux kernel feature intended to improve performance by making more efficient use of your processor’s memory-mapping hardware. It is enabled ("enabled=always") by default in most Linux distributions. Transparent Hugepages gives some applications a small performance improvement (~ 10%…

269

Ubuntu 17.04 Released

Ubuntu 17.04 released today, supporting Kubernetes, Docker, LXD and Snaps. This is the 26th release of Ubuntu, the world’s most widely deployed Linux OS and the leading platform for cloud and IoT operations. “The breadth and pace of open source innovation has made it the center of gravity in technology today, and the…