Alex Russell

SEPTEMBER 20, 2020

Pre-publication gates were valuable when better answers weren't available, but commentators should update their priors to account for hardware and software progress of the past 13 years. The closer one looks, the less a definition of "appiness" can be pinned down to specific technologies. Don't like the consequences?

Hardware 64

Hardware Mobile Programming Java 64

The Morning Paper

APRIL 2, 2019

That is to say, even in the presence of persistent malware e.g. in the firmware of peripheral controllers, network interface cards, disk and USB controllers, and so on, root of trust can assure us that the system has booted into a known and trusted state (or alternatively, uncover the presence of malware with high probability).

Software 40

Software Software Programming Hardware 40

SQL Server According to Bob

JANUARY 11, 2020

Stable Media Stable media is often confused with physical storage. SQL Server defines stable media as storage that can survive system restart or common failure. Stable media is commonly physical disk storage, but other devices and certain caching facilities qualify as well.

Servers 40

Servers Cache Media Hardware 40

High Scalability

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

It is limited by the disk space; it can’t expand storage elastically; it chokes if you run few I/O intensive processes or try collaborating with 100 other users. Over time, costs for S3 and GCS became reasonable and with Egnyte’s storage plugin architecture, our customers can now bring in any storage backend of their choice.

Architecture 52

Architecture Cache Azure Storage 52

Alex Russell

OCTOBER 22, 2017

We constrain ourselves to a real-world baseline device + network configuration to measure progress. Budgets are scaled to a benchmark network & device. JavaScript is the single most expensive part of any page in ways that are a function of both network capacity and device speed. The median user is on a slow network.

Performance 68

Performance Benchmarking Network Mobile 68

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 11, 2021

Networking, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 OCSP stapling, EV/DV certificates, packaging, IPv6, QUIC, HTTP/3. If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled 3G network (e.g. Moto G4) on a slow 3G network, emulated at 400ms RTT and 400kbps transfer speed. 300ms RTT, 1.6 Mbps down, 0.8

Performance 145

Performance Cache Media Metrics 145

Alex Russell

JULY 14, 2021

I've got a long blog post brewing on this, but jumping to the end, an operable definition is: A browser is an application that can register with an OS to handle http and https navigations by default. On Android today and early iOS versions, WebViews allow embedders to observe and modify all network traffic (regardless of encryption).

Google 121

Google Mobile Engineering Internet 121

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 6, 2020

If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled 3G network (e.g. To make the performance impact more visible, you could even introduce 2G Tuesdays or set up a throttled 3G/4G network in your office for faster testing. 300ms RTT, 1.6 Mbps down, 0.8

Performance 145

Performance Cache Network Metrics 145

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 7, 2019

If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled network (e.g. To make the performance impact more visible, you could even introduce 2G Tuesdays or set up a throttled 3G network in your office for faster testing. 150ms RTT, 1.5 Mbps down, 0.7 Mbps up) with a throttled CPU (5× slowdown).

Performance 104

Performance Cache Metrics Network 104

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Linux has been adding tracing technologies over the years: kprobes (kernel dynamic tracing), uprobes (user-level dynamic tracing), tracepoints (static tracing), and perf_events (profiling and hardware counters). At my employer we sometimes use SR-IOV for direct network interface access, and NVMe for direct disk access. x series.

Virtualization 76

Virtualization AWS Engineering Hardware 76

The Morning Paper

JANUARY 19, 2020

But do A and C share the same storage, compute, or network resources for example? Therefore, while it is possible to anticipate situational surprise, you can’t anticipate fundamental surprise (because by definition you have no model capable of inferring such an outcome). How do participants do that?

C++ 50

C++ Systems Software Software 50