metadata performance

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms. It covers why standard containers like unordered_map perform poorly on modern CPUs.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

Emery Berger's CppCon 2020 plenary on why performance is hard on modern hardware after the end of Dennard scaling. It covers benchmarking pitfalls and introduces new profiling tools for finding real bottlenecks.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.

Digital Foundry investigates why Resident Evil Village on PC runs worse with Capcom's Denuvo DRM than a cracked version. They benchmark and confirm performance and frame-pacing differences.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast. He covers techniques for low and predictable latency, including avoiding main memory and cache misses.

Casey Muratori responds on-stream to a dismissive Twitter post by demonstrating how slow Visual Studio's startup and debugger watch window are, comparing it to much older software and machines. It is a long rant about software performance and bloat.

Aaron Hsu shows how to manipulate and transform tree data in APL using arrays and inverted tables instead of pointers. He claims much smaller code, better performance and easier parallelisation.

Leptos creator Greg Johnston examines Rust/WebAssembly frontend frameworks against JavaScript frameworks using the JS framework benchmark. He argues that WASM is no longer too slow for DOM-heavy rendering.

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

A solo performance of Steve Reich's Piano Phase, with one pianist playing both parts, recorded in 2004 with Reich in attendance. It is a 15-minute minimalist phasing piece.

The Who performing Won't Get Fooled Again at Shepperton Studios in 1978, filmed for The Kids Are Alright. It was Keith Moon's last performance with the band.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

A full performance of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by eighth blackbird with Third Coast Percussion and others, recorded in Chicago in 2011. It is an hour-long minimalist piece built on phasing and repeating patterns.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

Chandler Carruth shows how to squeeze more performance out of already-optimized C++ code, covering how the CPU executes it. The talk goes into pipelining, branch prediction and speculative execution using benchmarks.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Robert Collins explains why rustup installs were painfully slow on Windows and how changes to rustup and Windows cut install time from 3m30s to 14s. The talk covers NTFS, small files and the cost of antivirus hooks on file close.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

Footage of Stefani Germanotta, later Lady Gaga, performing 'Captivated' and 'Electric Kiss' at NYU's Ultraviolet Live talent show in 2005-era college days. It shows her singing and playing before she became famous.

Matt Godbolt builds a toy path tracer in C++ in three different styles and compares them on clarity, testability, compile time and run-time performance. The talk was given at CppCon 2019.

Developer Voices interviews Chris Lattner about Mojo, a Python-compatible language aimed at CPU/GPU performance built on LLVM and MLIR. It covers performance features, the type system and why Mojo uses Python syntax.

A one-minute clip of Rochus Keller performing as a one-man band: slap bass with the left hand, Rhodes and lead guitar with the right, and drums with the feet.

David Ditzel of Esperanto Technologies presents their massively parallel, energy-efficient RISC-V processors at the 7th RISC-V Workshop in 2017. It covers the high-performance many-core design aimed at machine learning.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.