https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/tags/systems/ Recent content in Systems on Nikhil's blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Sat, 24 Nov 2018 14:05:00 -0700 https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2018/sampling-profiler-internals-suspending-threads/ Sat, 24 Nov 2018 14:05:00 -0700 https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2018/sampling-profiler-internals-suspending-threads/ This is part 2 of the Sampling Profilers Internals series. Introduction Suspending threads Stack unwinding Symbolication Presenting profile output Extending the profiler to managed languages As described in the introduction, a sampling profiler captures the stack of each thread every few milliseconds. To do this, it is preferable to suspend the thread 1. We don’t want the stack changing under us as we are profiling. Even worse, a thread could just terminate while we were attempting to profile it and invalidate all the memory we want to read. https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2018/sampling-profiler-internals-introduction/ Sat, 24 Nov 2018 14:00:00 -0700 https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2018/sampling-profiler-internals-introduction/ Sampling profilers are useful tools for performance analysis of programs. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past several months digging into various implementations of sampling profilers and reading a lot about symbolication, threads, stack unwinding and other gory operating system details. This series of posts attempts to summarize my understanding. Introduction Suspending threads Stack unwinding Symbolication Presenting profile output Extending the profiler to managed languages Background High CPU usage is a problem that comes up often in widely used software. https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2017/cppcon-2017-talks/ Sat, 09 Dec 2017 08:56:04 -0800 https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2017/cppcon-2017-talks/ I spent a recent holiday listening to several CppCon talks. I’m hooked! I was impressed by the generally high quality of the talks. The lack of “use my/my company’s framework which is so awesome!” talks was refreshing. In addition, the use cases where C++ trumps most competition are often either performance sensitive, or correctness sensitive under strong constraints. Of course, this means contending with the syntactic and semantic complexities C++ throws at you. https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2017/cancellable-select/ Wed, 29 Mar 2017 07:49:03 -0700 https://master--suspicious-stonebraker-7d2d21.netlify.app/post/2017/cancellable-select/ I spent the last couple of months diving into networking code at work. This led to some interesting discoveries, including how to allow an in-progress network operation to be canceled on demand. This can be an attempt to establish a connection, or a socket read or write. The standard use case is to allow the user to cancel an operation or to allow a clean shutdown when multiple threads are operating on sockets.