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Doubling Mono’s Float Speed
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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LMDB: Intel Optane SSD Microbenchmark
Since the point of these tests is to explore the performance of the Optane SSDs, the tests are configured much like the previous ondisk benchmark, using a database approximately 5x larger than RAM, to minimize the impact of caching in RAM and force the storage devices to be exercised. However, there are some twists to…
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Exploring .NET Core platform intrinsics: Part 4 – Alignment and pipelining
You’ve implemented some of your performance critical code using the new platform intrinsics API. The code is now running 10x or even 100x faster than before, and you might think that it can’t get any faster. This post will show you some less obvious (but almost universally applicable) techniques for improving the…
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Bandaid – Dropbox service proxy
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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Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
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Anatomy of a DNS Lookup – Part II
and determined that most programs reference /etc/resolv.conf along the way to figuring out which DNS server to look up.
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Progress in performance and scalability with CockroachDB
CockroachDB 2.1 is 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora at less than 2% of the price per tpmC. Read on to see performance benchmarks of CockroachDB 2.1, including the latest TPC-C results.
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Amazon DynamoDB On Demand
January 31, 2025: Post updated to clarify the reduced on-demand pricing and workloads recommendations. Just a few years ago, creating a database that could support your business at any scale while providing consistent low latency was a daunting task. That changed for me in 2012 while reading Werner Vogels’ blog post…
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Detecting Spectre and Meltdown Using Hardware Performance Counters
Security pros have been working on a new hardware attack type that exploits cache side-effects and speculative execution to perform privileged memory disclosure.
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Migrating Messenger storage to optimize performance
More than a billion people now use Facebook Messenger to instantly share text, photos, video, and more. As we have evolved the product and added new functionality, the underlying technologies that …
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Designing Resilient Systems: Circuit Breakers or Retries?
Grab designs fault-tolerant systems that can withstand failures allowing us to continuously provide our consumers with the many services they expect from us.
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The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU (2016)
Some new proposed protocols will encrypt the transport layer headers. Encryption is good, so more encryption must be better, right? Unfortunately there's going to be a huge hidden cost that'll be paid by anyone troubleshooting networking problems.
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Making a low level Linux debugger, part 2: C
Last time , we started making a debugger and live editor for (re)creating assembly and C programs.
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Showdown: MySQL 8 vs. PostgreSQL 10
Now that MySQL 8 and PostgreSQL 10 are out, it's a good time to revisit how the two major open source relational databases compete against each other. Before these versions, the general perception has been that while Postgres is superior in feature sets and its pedigree, MySQL is more battle
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Systems, not Programs
We need programming, but do we need the program?
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Portability of tar features
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
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Pessimism about parallelism
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one.
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Better slow than sorry – VirtualBox 3D acceleration considered harmful
The 3 - d acceleration feature of VirtualBox has had a bit of a rough time this year . One could argue that technically this component might not be considered attack surface in VirtualBox, due to the big warning put out in the documentation recommending against its use (emphasis mine):
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Systemd's DynamicUser feature is currently dangerous
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Even more fun with building and benchmarking Firefox with GCC and Clang
Recent switch of official Firefox builds to Clang on all platforms has triggered some questions about the quality of code produced by GCC c...
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The Effects of CPU Turbo: 768X Stddev
I build and maintain smf - the fastest RPC in the west.The main language supported is C++. We use Seastar asthe actual asynchronous framework.
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Reversing a MacOS Kernel Extension
In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…
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Chromium Security: Site Isolation
Site Isolation is a security feature in Chrome that offers additional protection against some types of security bugs. It uses Chrome's sandbox to make it harder for untrustworthy websites to access or steal information from your accounts on other websites.
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Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
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