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When network is faster than browser cache (2020)
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
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What does an idle CPU do? (2014)
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
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How does rsync work?
This post is the third article in a series of blog posts about rsync, see the Series Overview. With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works. How does rsync work? When talking about the rsync protocol, we need to distinguish between:
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The tar archive format, and why GNU tar extracts in quadratic time
Date: 2022-07-23 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00014-tar.md
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How to build software like an SRE
I’ve been doing this “reliability” stuff for a little while now (~5 years), at companies ranging from about 20 developers to over 2,000. I’ve always cared primarily about the software elements I describe as living “outside” the application – like, how does it get its configuration? What kinds of instances does it run…
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We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
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Scaling Mastodon is impossible
Now that Twitter is dying, what can replace it?
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Cache invalidation really is one of the hardest problems in computer science
My colleagues recently wrote a great post on the Netflix tech blog about a tough performance issue they wrestled with. They ultimately diagnosed the problem as false sharing, which is a performance…
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Using Windows after 15 years on Linux
I've been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it's been going.
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My 70 year old mother has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years
My mother turned 70, February 2021, and she has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years. My mother-in-law is 65, she has been using Linux on the desktop since 2015.
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What makes a senior engineer? Writing software vs. building systems
Junior Engineers care about writing Software. They value code quality, employ best practices, try to adopt cutting-edge technologies. They invest a lo
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From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story
Like many of you, I've got hardware on my desk that's sending UDP packets, and the time has come to take a closer look at them.
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LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
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Systemd service sandboxing and security hardening (2020)
The systemd-analyze security command gives your systemd service units an automated security rating. This is a good starting point for security hardening.
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Python is Actually Portable
Gautham's Blog
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Finding the “second bug” in glibc’s condition variable
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_s…
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The cult of dd (2017)
You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century.
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Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
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Optimizations can have unexpectedly large effects when combined with caches
This post is about a non-obvious interaction between performance optimizations and LRU/time limited caching.
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Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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A byte string library for Rust
bstr is a byte string library for Rust and its 1.0 version has just been released ! It provides string oriented operations on arbitrary sequences of bytes, but is most useful when those bytes are UTF-8. In other words, it provides a string type that is UTF-8 by convention , where as Rust’s built-in string types are…
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Clip control on the Apple GPU
After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games. There’s more to do, but Neverball is already playable (and a lot of fun!).
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Serenity OS: Interview
How would you build an operating system? My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP. But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling…
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