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Seeing through hardware counters: A journey to 3x performance increase
By Vadim Filanovsky and Harshad Sane
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Faster CRC32 on the Apple M1
CRC32 is a checksum first proposed in 1961, and now used in a wide variety of performance sensitive contexts, from file formats (zip, png, gzip) to filesystems (ext4, btrfs) and protocols (like eth…
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Go performance from version 1.2 to 1.18
Shows how much the performance of Go has improved from version 1.2 through to 1.18 -- in its compiler, runtime, and libraries.
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How PostgreSQL stores rows
poking inside postgres pages
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Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a… Continue reading →
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Linux Desktop Environments System Usage
Over the years I've seen a lot of poorly made comparisons of Linux Desktop Environments in terms of system usage and in this article I want to make things right once and for all.
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Apple has a bug in its disk I/O throttling code that affects raw disk copies
Matt Jacobson, recovering software engineer.
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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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Go runtime: 4 years later
A check-in on the status of Go runtime development
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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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Wasmer 3.0
Today we are very excited to launch Wasmer 3.0, following three months of work since our first alpha. So, what’s new in Wasmer? - `wasmer` is now able...
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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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Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22
By Laura Nolan, with contributions from Glen D. Sanford, Jamie Scheinblum, and Chris Sullivan. Assessing conditions Slack experienced a major incident on February 22 this year, during which time many users were unable to connect to Slack, including the author — which certainly made my role as Incident Commander more…
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November 2022 Progress Report
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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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.