1 day agoSome VM follow-up informationI kept wanting to write post-scripts to my previous article but that soon gets ridiculous so here are some follow-ups in the form of Q&A. Why mention the utility of odd page sizes that are supported basically nowhere? I have friends that work on CPUs. Some of them might be listening. Why not use big pages just for code or other things that don’t grow? The VM subsystem is actually primarily (IMO) in the business of giving…Performance4 min readPerformance4 min read
2 days agoVirtual Memory, Segments, Paging and Big PagesForeword — I’ve had a lively discussion the last few days on X (formerly known as Twitter). I learned some stuff and I thought it might be useful to try to share it. It all started with an innocuous tweet. I know enough about virtual memory management to be dangerous but…Performance12 min readPerformance12 min read
Sep 25Performance Improvements in .NET 8This is a summary of the excellent and lengthy document by Stephen Toub In the interest of making it easier to find the original source material I have (nearly) reproduced the original outline with links to the original document and I will add some summary notes in each section. Keep…Performance14 min readPerformance14 min read
Sep 13Some Notes on Stateful Servers in .NETIntroduction Before I get into this at all, let’s give the usual disclaimers: the following is only going to be approximately correct because being fully correct takes way too many words this will be a generalization of different kinds of things which are likely to be important but might be more…Performance5 min readPerformance5 min read
Sep 7Understanding the Shape of Your DataFrom time to time it’s common to have a discussion about metrics. These can be all kinds of different metrics. It could be anything from CPU usage, to latency, to remediation time. …5 min read5 min read
Aug 31C# Lambdas: A Code TeardownContinuing in my series of teardowns, I took some time to do an assembly language teardown of some C# code that uses lambdas in a very simple way. The disassembled code below is a release build for Windows, so it uses the Windows ABI. The complete source code for the…C Sharp Programming6 min readC Sharp Programming6 min read
Jul 2A few days ago, I received a message from Nenone Donaldson, a friend and colleague at the…A few days ago, I received a message from Nenone Donaldson, a friend and colleague at the University of Waterloo. It began as follows: “On Wednesday, June 28, a former University of Waterloo student stabbed Katy Fulfer, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and two students in Hagey Hall…4 min read4 min read
Jun 17Some Words About CourageMy childhood friend Unnati wrote an article in response to some things I wrote recently. In her article she describes, in part, her life experience dealing with the reality of modern workplaces in the last several decades. I wish I could say that I found her experience incredible. The sad…Equity3 min readEquity3 min read
Jun 8Some Words About SafetyToday I want to talk about Safety. This is a natural follow-up to the article I wrote about Fear. I’m a bit nervous publishing this particular article; I have a lot less direct experience and I don’t want to come across like some wise-guy “telling the world how it is”…Equity6 min readEquity6 min read
Jun 8I want all the threads for meeeeeRecently there was a discussion about using lots of threads on a server workload and the costs/consequences of this practice. I have to start with “your mileage may vary”, which is really the only answer anyone can give that’s guaranteed to be correct. …Software6 min readSoftware6 min read
