Mechanical Sympathy

In a previous article I reported what appeared to be a performance issue with CAS/LOCK instructions on the Sandy Bridge  microarchitecture...

Lately a number of people have suggested I start a discussion group on the subject of mechanical sympathy, so I've taken the plunge and...

In my last post I detailed the implications of the access patterns your code takes to main memory.  Since then I've had a lot of quest...

In high-performance computing it is often said that the cost of a cache-miss is the largest performance penalty for an algorithm.  For many...

Do you ever wish you could turn a Java object into a stream of bytes as fast as it can be done in a native language like C++?  If you use s...

How should a system respond when under sustained load?  Should it keep accepting requests until its response times follow the deadly hockey...