In Postgress, if you access a row in transaction T0, then delete that row on transaction T1, then that row is still accessible in transaction T0. How Postgres maintain that view of row? Where does that data sit on disk? Check out other articles in this series such as Forks, files, pages. Let’s level up our database knowledge.

The first beta release of the upcoming Postgres 14 release was made available yesterday. In this article we’ll take a first look at what’s in the beta, with an emphasis on one major performance improvement, as well as three monitoring improvements that caught our attention.

Performance tuning does not only mean adjusting postgresql.conf properly, or making sure that your kernel parameters are properly tuned. Performance tuning also implies that we have to find performance bottlenecks first, isolate slow queries and understand what the system is doing.

Be aware that you won’t be able to use these setting and immediately bring your RPS up magically. This is a post about customize many low level for a specific workload. Eg, disable Spectre mitigation, syscall blocking. Imagine setting your code to a happy path to eliminate all logging, all if/else auth checking. It’s purely a research to show how fast we can push the machine.

To Dropbox, One of the best ways to find ways to improve performance, we’ve found, is to work closely with our customers. We love shared troubleshooting sessions with their own engineering teams to find and eliminate bottlenecks. They share a story how they are able to work with Window Core TCP team to improved the Windows implementation of the TCP RACK-TLP algorithm

Most of time when dealing with numbers, we deal with number upto 64 bits and we usually have thing like int32, int64 in our code. The max of these are 2^64. For thing bigger than that, we use Big Number. The use of Big Numbers in Cryptography is actually what makes us care about being Constant-Time.

1Password is a password manager app and they finally release Linux support. Their app leverage Rust for backend, Electron, TypeScript, React, Neon to build the UI with HTML technologies.

Look into a distributed locking algorithm based on Google Cloud. I’ll discuss several existing implementations and suggest algorithmic improvements in terms of performance and robustness.

The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (120 or 240 volts AC) into stable power at the DC voltages that the computer requires. The power supply must be compact and low-cost while transforming the power efficiently and safely. To achieve these goals, power supplies use a variety of techniques and are more complex inside than you might expect.

A customer writes in and says the dreaded words: “My app is slow”. This post talked about how Slack impelement and roll out distributed tracing for their apps.