Hacker News with Generative AI: Performance

We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash (freedium.cfd)
In the quest for reliable systems that can handle extreme workloads, choosing the right programming language is critical.
EXT4 for Linux 6.16 Brings a Change Yielding "Stupendous Performance" (phoronix.com)
EXT4 For Linux 6.16 Brings A Change Yielding "Really Stupendous Performance"
Using Postgres pg_test_fsync tool for testing low latency writes (tanelpoder.com)
Here’s a useful tool for quickly testing whether a disk (or a cloud block store volume) is a good candidate for your database WAL/redo logs and any other files that require low latency writes. The pg_test_fsync tool is bundled with standard Postgres packages, so no extra installation is needed. You don’t actually have to use Postgres as your database, this tool’s output is universally valuable for any workload requiring fast writes.
SteamOS seems to destroy Windows 11 on gaming performance and battery life (windowscentral.com)
Btrfs to See More Performance Improvements with Linux 6.16 (phoronix.com)
Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening, several early pull requests were already sent out this week in advance of Linux 6.15 expected for release later today.
Changelog: Lazy trees (faster Nix builds) (determinate.systems)
Lazy trees have been one of the most hotly requested Nix features for quite some time. They make Nix much more efficient in larger repositories, particularly in massive monorepos. And so we’re excited to announce that lazy trees have landed in Determinate Nix version 3.5.2, based on version 2.28.3 of upstream Nix.
Rust Coreutils 0.1 Released with Big Performance Gains – Matches or Exceeds GNU (phoronix.com)
With Ubuntu 25.10 planning to ship the Rust-based Coreutils "uutils" by default, it's a big year ahead for this alternative to GNU Coreutils.
We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash (freedium.cfd)
In the quest for reliable systems that can handle extreme workloads, choosing the right programming language is critical. We designed a comprehensive stress test to push seven popular languages to their absolute limits, measuring performance under conditions that would make most systems buckle. The results challenged our preconceptions and revealed surprising strengths in an unexpected contender.
Show HN: SuperUtilsPlus – A Modern Alternative to Lodash (github.com/dhaxor)
A superior alternative to Lodash with improved performance, TypeScript support, and developer experience.
What's So Bad About POSIX I/O? (2017) (nextplatform.com)
POSIX I/O is almost universally agreed to be one of the most significant limitations standing in the way of I/O performance exascale system designs push 100,000 client nodes.
Big Problems From Big IN lists with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL (andyatkinson.com)
If you’ve created web apps with relational databases and ORMs like Active Record (part of Ruby on Rails), you’ve probably experienced database performance problems after a certain size of data and query volume.
A 10x Faster TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg [video] (youtube.com)
Firefox Profiler (firefox.com)
Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5 (railsatscale.com)
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
Improving performance of rav1d video decoder (ohadravid.github.io)
Making the rav1d Video Decoder 1% Faster
Oodle 2.9.14 and Intel 13th/14th gen CPUs (wordpress.com)
There’s a hardware problem affecting Intel 13th/14th gen CPUs, mostly desktop ones. This made the rounds through the press last year and has been on forums etc. for much longer than that. For months, we thought this was a rare bug in the decoder, but from stats in Epic’s crash reports for Fortnite (as well as stats for other Unreal Engine and Oodle licensees) it was fairly striking that this issue really seemed to affect only some CPUs.
Direct TLS can speed up your connections (marc-bowes.com)
A few months ago, one of my Aurora DSQL teammates reported a curious finding.
Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5 (railsatscale.com)
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
JavaScript Ecosystem Performance (e18e.dev)
e18e (Ecosystem Performance) is an initiative to connect the folks and projects working to improve the performance of JS packages.
An Almost Pointless Exercise in GPU Optimization (speechmatics.com)
Not everyone is able to write funky fused operators to make ML models run faster on GPUs using clever quantisation tricks. However lots of developers work with algorithms that feel like they should be able to leverage the thousands of cores in a GPU to run faster than using the dozens of cores on a server CPU. To see what is possible and what is involved, I revisited the first problem I ever considered trying to accelerate with a GPU.
“ZLinq”, a Zero-Allocation LINQ Library for .NET (medium.com)
I’ve released ZLinq v1 last month! By building on structs and generics, it achieves zero allocations. It includes extensions like LINQ to Span, LINQ to SIMD, LINQ to Tree (FileSystem, JSON, GameObject, etc.), a drop-in replacement Source Generator for arbitrary types, and support for multiple platforms including .NET Standard 2.0, Unity, and Godot. It has now exceeded 2000 GitHub stars.
The Lost Decade of Small Data? (duckdb.org)
TL;DR: We benchmark DuckDB on a 2012 MacBook Pro to decide: did we lose a decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?
LLM-D: Kubernetes-Native Distributed Inference (llm-d.ai)
llm-d is a Kubernetes-native high-performance distributed LLM inference framework - a well-lit path for anyone to serve at scale, with the fastest time-to-value and competitive performance per dollar for most models across most hardware accelerators.
Visual Studio Code: Text Buffer Reimplementation (2018) (visualstudio.com)
The Visual Studio Code 1.21 release includes a brand new text buffer implementation which is much more performant, both in terms of speed and memory usage.
Real-Time Grass Simulation in the Browser – Over 1M Blades at 60 FPS (techredux.co)
FLOWINGGRASS FIELDS
SDB Scans the Ruby Stack Without the GVL (github.com/yfractal)
Monitoring Node.js: Key Metrics You Should Track (last9.io)
Understand which metrics matter in Node.js applications, why they’re important, and how to track them effectively in production.
Making iText's table rendering faster (itextpdf.com)
Here at Apryse, we occasionally have some free time at the end of our iText development sprints where we're encouraged to use our initiative to "work on whatever" we fancy.
A lost decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics? (duckdb.org)
TL;DR: We benchmark DuckDB on a 2012 MacBook Pro to decide: did we lose a decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?
Pglocks.org (pglocks.org)