The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser Hussein Nasser
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- Technology
Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own.
Most of my content in the podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering
Buy me a coffee
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr
🧑🏫 Courses I Teach
https://husseinnasser.com/courses
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io uring gets even faster
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://os.husseinnasser.com
Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.
In this video I explore this with a focus on what zerocopy.
0:00 Intro
0:30 IO_uring gets faster
2:00 What is io_uring
7:00 How Normal Copying Work
12:00 How Zero Copy Works
13:50 ZeroCopy and TLS
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-IO_uring
https://lore.kernel.org/io-uring/fef75ea0-11b4-4815-8c66-7b19555b279d@kernel.dk/?s=09 -
They made Python faster with this compiler option
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://oscourse.win
Looks like fedora is compiling cpython with the -o3 flag, which does aggressive function inlining among other optimizations.
This seems to improve python benchmarks performance by at most 1.16x at a cost of an extra 3MB in binary size (text segment). Although it does seem to slow down some benchmarks as well though not significantly.
O1 - local register allocation, subexpression elimination
O2 - Function inlining only small functions
O3 - Agressive inlining, SMID
0:00 Intro
1:00 Fedora Linux gets Fast Python
5:40 What is Compiling?
9:00 Compiling with No Optimization
12:10 Compiling with -O1
15:30 Compiling with -O2
20:00 Compiling with -O3
23:20 Showing Numbers
Backend Troubleshooting Course
https://performance.husseinnasser.com -
How Apache Kafka got faster by switching ext4 to XFS
https://oscourse.win
Allegro improved their Kafka produce tail latency by over 80% when they switched from ext4 to xfs. What I enjoyed most about this article is the detailed analysis and tweaking the team made to ext4 before considering switching to xfs. This is a classic case of how a good tech blog looks like in my opinion.
0:00 Intro
0:30 Summary
2:35 How Kafka Works?
5:00 Producers Writes are Slow
7:10 Tracing Kafka Protocol
12:00 Tracing Kernel System Calls
16:00 Journaled File Systems
21:00 Improving ext4
26:00 Switching to XFS
Blog
https://blog.allegro.tech/2024/03/kafka-performance-analysis.html -
Google Patches Linux kernel with 40% TCP performance
Get my backend course https://backend.win
Google submitted a patch to Linux Kernel 6.8 to improve TCP performance by 40%, this is done via rearranging the tcp structures for better cpu cache lines, I explore this here.
0:00 Intro
0:30 Google improves Linux Kernel TCP by 40%
1:40 How CPU Cache Line Works
6:45 Reviewing the Google Patch
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-Networking
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20231129072756.3684495-1-lixiaoyan@google.com/
Discovering Backend Bottlenecks: Unlocking Peak Performance
https://performance.husseinnasser.com -
Database Torn pages
0:00 Intro
2:00 File System Block vs Database Pages
4:00 Torn pages or partial page
7:40 How Oracle Solves torn pages
8:40 MySQL InnoDB Doublewrite buffer
10:45 Postgres Full page writes -
Cloudflare Open sources Pingora (NGINX replacement)
Get my backend course https://backend.win
Cloudflare has announced they are opening sources Pingora as a networking framework! Big news, let us discuss
0:00 Intro
0:30 Reasons why Cloudflare built Pingora?
3:00 It is a framework!
7:30 What in Pingora?
11:50 Security in Pingora
13:45 Multi-threading in Pingora
21:00 Customization vs Configuration
25:00 Summary
https://blog.cloudflare.com/pingora-open-source/?utm_campaign=cf_blog&utm_content=20240228&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=twitter