Hacker News with Generative AI: Performance Optimization

Train faster static embedding models with sentence transformers (huggingface.co)
This blog post introduces a method to train static embedding models that run 100x to 400x faster on CPU than state-of-the-art embedding models, while retaining most of the quality. This unlocks a lot of exciting use cases, including on-device and in-browser execution, edge computing, low power and embedded applications.
Machine Learning, Sentence Embeddings, Performance Optimization, Hugging Face
52 points by stephantul 2 days ago | 1 comments
Fedora 42 Looks to Ship Optimized Executables for Different x86_64 Capabilities (phoronix.com)
Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.
Linux, Operating Systems, Performance Optimization, CPU Architecture, Fedora
14 points by rbanffy 5 days ago | 2 comments
CSSWind: Bloat-Free Component Styling (xeiaso.net)
What you need when even HTMX is too much.
CSS, Web Development, Front-End Development, Performance Optimization
4 points by xena 6 days ago | 0 comments
YJIT 3.4: Even Faster and More Memory-Efficient (railsatscale.com)
It’s 2025, and this year again, the YJIT team brings you a new version of YJIT that is even faster, more stable, and more memory-efficient.
Performance Optimization, Software, New Releases
8 points by onnnon 8 days ago | 0 comments
Double-keyed caching: Browser cache partitioning (addyosmani.com)
The web’s caching model served us well for over two decades. Recently, in the name of privacy, it’s undergone a fundamental shift that challenges many of our performance optimization assumptions. This is called Double-keyed Caching or cache-partitioning more generally. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and how to adapt.
Web Development, Performance Optimization, Browser Caching, Privacy
74 points by feross 10 days ago | 25 comments
Expressive Vector Engine – SIMD in C++ (github.com/jfalcou)
EVE is a re-implementation of the old EVE SIMD library by Falcou et al. which for a while was named Boost.SIMD. It's a C++20 and onward implementation of a type based wrapper around SIMD extensions sets for most current architectures. It aims at showing how C++20 can be used to design and implement efficient, low level, high abstraction library suited for high performance.
C++, SIMD, Performance Optimization, Libraries, Open Source
76 points by klaussilveira 12 days ago | 36 comments
Breaking Up with Long Tasks or: how I learned to group loops and wield the yield (perfplanet.com)
Arrays are in every web developer’s toolbox, and there are a dozen ways to iterate over them. Choose wrong, though, and all of that processing time will happen synchronously in one long, blocking task. The thing is, the most natural ways are the wrong ways. A simple for..of loop that processes each array item is synchronous by default, while Array methods like forEach and map can ONLY run synchronously.
JavaScript, Performance Optimization, Web Development
203 points by jcbhmr 14 days ago | 71 comments
Mptcp: Revolutionizing connectivity, one path at a time (cloudflare.com)
The Internet is designed to provide multiple paths between two endpoints. Attempts to exploit multi-path opportunities are almost as old as the Internet, culminating in RFCs documenting some of the challenges. Still, today, virtually all end-to-end communication uses only one available path at a time.
Networking, Internet Protocols, Performance Optimization, Multipath TCP
7 points by majke 15 days ago | 4 comments
Speeding Up SQLite Inserts (julik.nl)
In my work I tend to reach for SQLite more and more. The type of work I find it useful for most these days is quickly amalgamating, dissecting, collecting and analyzing large data sets. As I have outlined in my Euruko talk on scheduling, a key element of the project was writing a simulator. That simulator outputs metrics - lots and lots of metrics, which resemble what our APM solution collects.
Databases, Performance Optimization, SQLite
14 points by julik 15 days ago | 3 comments
Postgres UUIDv7 and per-back end monotonicity (brandur.org)
An implementation for UUIDv7 was committed to Postgres earlier this month. These have all the benefits of a v4 (random) UUID, but are generated with a more deterministic order using the current time, and perform considerably on inserts using ordered structures like B-trees.
Databases, UUID, Performance Optimization
230 points by craigkerstiens 15 days ago | 104 comments
Static search trees: faster than binary search (curiouscoding.nl)
In this post, we will implement a static search tree (S+ tree) for high-throughput searching of sorted data, as introduced on Algorithmica.
Data Structures, Algorithms, Performance Optimization
656 points by atombender 17 days ago | 232 comments
Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 4 (byroot.github.io)
In the previous post, we established that as long as ruby/json wasn’t competitive on micro-benchmarks, public perception wouldn’t change. Since what made ruby/json appear so bad on micro-benchmarks was its setup cost, we had to find ways to reduce it further.
Performance Optimization, Ruby, JSON, Software
213 points by jeremy_k 19 days ago | 44 comments
Peephole optimizations: adding `opt_respond_to` to the Ruby VM, part 4 (jpcamara.com)
In The Ruby Syntax Holy Grail: adding opt_respond_to to the Ruby VM, part 3, I found what I referred to as the “Holy Grail” of Ruby syntax. I’m way overstating it, but it’s a readable, sequential way of viewing how a large portion of the Ruby syntax is compiled.
Ruby, Programming Languages, Performance Optimization, Compiler Design
38 points by chmaynard 21 days ago | 2 comments
Subprocess: Don't close all file descriptors by default (close_fds=False) (python.org)
To make subprocess faster, I propose to no longer close all file descriptors by default in subprocess: change Popen close_fds parameter default to False (close_fds=False).
Python, Programming, Software, Performance Optimization
35 points by luu 24 days ago | 22 comments
The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby (denisdefreyne.com)
In the never-ending quest to write code that is performant, we have many techniques at our disposal. One of those techniques is memoization,111 That’s memoization, not memorization — there’s no “r”!  which boils down to storing the results of expensive function calls, so that these expensive functions do not need to be called more than absolutely necessary.
Ruby, Programming, Performance Optimization, Memoization
130 points by thunderbong 26 days ago | 70 comments
Navtive FlameGraphViewer (laladrik.xyz)
There is something in Rust Analyzer that I would like to fix. This requires understanding its interaction with Chalk. To find the starting point I ran Rust Analyzer with Linux Perf to get the tree of calls represented in a Flame Graph. The Flame Graph was so big, that it was rendered in the browser for quite a few seconds. The hover events were delayed. Nothing happened when I tried to open a frame of the graph.
Rust, Performance Optimization, Software Development, Visualization Tools
100 points by laladrik 26 days ago | 34 comments
Reads Causing Writes in Postgres (jesipow.com)
It is good practice to regularly inspect the statements running in the hot path of your Postgres instance. One way to do this is to examine the pg_stat_statements view, which shows various statistics about the SQL statements executed by the Postgres server.
Database, Postgres, Performance Optimization, Monitoring, SQL
224 points by thunderbong 27 days ago | 28 comments
Show HN: Bodo – high-performance compute engine for Python data processing (github.com/bodo-ai)
Bodo is a cutting edge compute engine for large scale Python data processing. Powered by an innovative auto-parallelizing just-in-time compiler, Bodo transforms Python programs into highly optimized, parallel binaries without requiring code rewrites, which makes Bodo 20x to 240x faster compared to alternatives!
Python, Data Processing, Performance Optimization, Open Source, Software
11 points by ehsantn 30 days ago | 2 comments
Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 1 (byroot.github.io)
I was recently made maintainer of the json gem, and aside from fixing some old bugs, I focused quite a bit on its performance, so that it is now the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby on most benchmarks.
Ruby, JSON, Performance Optimization, Programming Languages, Benchmarking
271 points by todsacerdoti 31 days ago | 62 comments
Valhalla – Java's Epic Refactor (inside.java)
Project Valhalla wants to heal the rift in Java’s type system between classes and primitives by introducing value classes, which “code like a class, work like an int” and offer a flat and dense memory layout.
Java, Programming Languages, Software Development, Performance Optimization
27 points by thunderbong 32 days ago | 1 comments
In Search of a Faster SQLite (avi.im)
SQLite is already fast. But can we make it even faster? Researchers at the University of Helsinki and Cambridge began with this question and published a paper, “Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O”. They demonstrate up to a 100x reduction in tail latency. These are my notes on the paper.
Databases, Performance Optimization, Research Papers
355 points by avinassh 32 days ago | 149 comments
In Search of a Faster SQLite (avi.im)
SQLite is already fast. But can we make it even faster? Researchers at the University of Helsinki and Cambridge began with this question and published a paper, “Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O”. They demonstrate up to a 100x reduction in tail latency. These are my notes on the paper.
Databases, Performance Optimization, Research Papers
15 points by avinassh 34 days ago | 0 comments
Algorithms for high performance terminal apps (textualize.io)
I've had the fortune of being able to work fulltime on a FOSS project for the last three plus years.
Algorithms, Terminal Applications, Performance Optimization
8 points by thunderbong 34 days ago | 0 comments
Fair Go vs. Elixir Benchmarks (github.com/antonputra)
The code previously used Jason.encode! but Jason.encode_to_iodata! should be preferred over IO devices. This should increase performance and reduce memory usage. This is what frameworks such as a Phoenix would have used by default
Programming, Elixir, Performance Optimization, Benchmarks, Web Frameworks
13 points by ahamez 37 days ago | 0 comments
My wish for VFS or filesystem level cgroup (v2) IO limits (utoronto.ca)
I wish Linux cgroups (v2 of course) had an option/interface that limited *filesystem* IO that you could do, read and/or write.
Linux, Operating Systems, File Systems, Performance Optimization, Security
4 points by ingve 38 days ago | 1 comments
Turning Off Zen 4's Op Cache for Curiosity and Giggles (chipsandcheese.com)
CPUs start executing instructions by fetching those instruction bytes from memory and decoding them into internal operations (micro-ops). Getting data from memory and operating on it consumes power and incurs latency. Micro-op caching is a popular technique to improve on both fronts, and involves caching micro-ops that correspond to frequently executed instructions.
CPUs, Performance Optimization, Hardware, Caching
68 points by mfiguiere 38 days ago | 10 comments
Building a Tiny CDN with Pyinfra and Chimera Linux (wezm.net)
In my quest to make linkedlist.org—my link blog—faster, I set up multiple deployments around the world. I used pyinfra to automate the process and Chimera Linux as the host operating system. Join me on this adventure in over-engineering to see how I dropped the average response time across nine global locations from 807ms to 189ms without spending a fortune.
Cloud Infrastructure, DevOps, Performance Optimization, Open Source
13 points by wezm 39 days ago | 0 comments
Using vectorization in C# to boost performance (btburnett.com)
As an application developer, I rarely get to dig into low-level C# code. I feel like this is probably true for most of my fellow C# developers as well. We build our applications on top of the excellent work of the .NET team and others and watch performance improve each year as if by magic. However, every now and then I get my hands a bit dirtier, and it’s a lot of fun.
.NET, C#, Performance Optimization
26 points by btburnett3 39 days ago | 5 comments
F# developer stories: how we've fixed a 9-year-old performance issue (microsoft.com)
Programming language authors have to think about many things at once: overall language design, runtime dangers, possible feature misuse, backward compatibility, forward compatibility, and so on. All these aspects, together with communication hiccups and time constraints, might get in the way of some seemingly clear and manageable problems.
Programming Languages, F#, Performance Optimization, Software Development
6 points by akkad33 39 days ago | 0 comments
Linux EFI Zboot Abandoning "Compression Library Museum", Focusing on Gzip, ZSTD (phoronix.com)
The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.
Linux Kernel, EFI, Compression, Performance Optimization
70 points by rbanffy 40 days ago | 19 comments