An aws engineer discovered a 50% regression in postgres throughput while testing the new Linux 7.0 kernel. The cause turns out to be massive TLB and page faults exacerbated by Postgres process-based design. In this backend engineering show episode I dive deep into how this was di ...Show more
Don't let AI rob you
A discussion about why many engineers still love the struggle, the mistakes, and the process of figuring things out themselves. This is how we grow and get better and stronger. Letting AI do everything (even though it can’t) robs us this feeling..
New Book: Root cause
I wrote a new book that has been in the works for years. It is called Root Cause, and it is for those who enjoy the art of backend engineering.Early in my career, 20 years ago, I built backend and database applications without fully grasping their inner mechanics. Performance iss ...Show more
5 Backend Design Patterns for Managing Threads and Sockets
In this video I introduce 5 different design patterns for building backend applications. Each mode explains how a socket listener is established, a connections are established and how threads and connections are managed to read, write and process requests.
Page Tables
Page tables provide the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory for each process. This means it needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. I explore the inner workings of page tables in this episode.0:00 Intro2:00 Virtual Memory ⁃ ⁃ 8:00 MMU10:00 Page Tables ⁃ ⁃ ...Show more