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Paper review: IPFS – Content addressed, versioned, P2P file system
This week we discussed the IPFS whitepaper by Juan Benet in my Distributed Systems Seminar. Remember peer-to-peer systems? IPFS is "pe...
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Supercharging the Git Commit Graph
Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of
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Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions
KPTI/KAISER Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions
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Lobotomizing Gnome
I have pretty basic needs from my desktop. I do 99% of my work using just three programs: a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox. I don't want a lot of bells and whistles in my desktop, and I really just want it to get out of the way so I can do my work.
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Reducing Memory Usage in Ruby
I’ve been working on building a compacting garbage collector in Ruby for a while now, and one of the biggest hurdles for implementing a compacting GC is updating references. For example, if Object A points to Object B, but the compacting GC moves Object B, how do we make sure that Object A points to the new location?…
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A Brief History of High Availability
The perennial question of homo sapiens is, 'How did we get here?' Today we're going to take a crack at answering that: where 'here' is defined as 'high availability for web services'.
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The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines
Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Peering into the crystal ball Kubernetes as a technology has been very important to my career this year, and will be even more so for next year…
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status
I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and …
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Making Direct3D games faster in Wine using modern OpenGL
I play World of Warcraft . Being a Linux user requires me to run this in Wine , a Windows API translation layer. While Wine is continuously improving, its performance in Direct3D games still leaves much to be desired.
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A new storage engine for PostgreSQL to provide better control over bloat
In the past few years, PostgreSQL has advanced a lot in terms of features, performance, and scalability for many-core systems. However, o...
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Lying to TCP makes it a best-effort streaming protocol
In this All Things Linguistic post Gretchen and Lauren introduce a model dialogue:
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It is fast or it is wrong
Fast programs are always fast, slow programs are slow even on a most powerful computers. Knowing that fast solution exists makes slow one plain wrong.
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Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
Distributed database performance––both latency and uptime––can be dramatically improved with CDN-like multi-region deployments.
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Fast base64 encoding and decoding
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
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Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]
Chris Lattner, the architect of the Clang/LLVM C compiler explained the effects of the C standard’s “undefined behavior”(UB):
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How to sleep a million years (2013)
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
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What Can I Do About Bufferbloat?
Bufferbloat is high latency (or lag) that occurs when there’s other traffic on your network. This means that your network isn’t always responsive - it’s wasting your time.
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Stream and Go: News feeds for 300M users, built on RocksDB and Raft
Discover the tech stack used by Stream. Explore 42 tools across 5 categories.
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Speed Without Wizardry
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
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Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?
A few weeks ago, I attended and spoke at KubeCon EU. It was a massive event attended by around 4,700 people...However, I felt there was an underlying problem with the whole spectacle: everyone I talked to was either an operator or an SRE. Where were al...
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Supercharging the Git Commit Graph IV: Bloom Filters
We've been discussing the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and how we can use generation numbers to accelerate commit walks. One area where we can get
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Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…