Performance

Diagram of the eBPF verifier, JIT, and hook points inside the Linux kernel.

Inside eBPF: How the Linux Kernel Runs Sandboxed Programs Inside Itself

TL;DR — eBPF lets you load and run sandboxed bytecode inside the Linux kernel at near-native speed, attached to hooks like network events, syscalls, and tracepoints. A static verifier guarantees the program terminates and stays safe before a JIT compiler turns it into machine code, which is why tools like Cilium, Pixie, and bpftrace have reshaped observability and networking in production. If you’ve shipped a service on Linux in the last five years, you’ve almost certainly been touched by eBPF — even if you never wrote a program yourself. Cilium powers the networking and service mesh layer for hyperscalers like AWS and Shopify. Datadog and New Relic ship kernel probes for zero-instrumentation tracing. Cloudflare uses eBPF to do connection tracking and DDoS mitigation at line rate. The reason this is possible is a piece of kernel machinery that turns “the kernel is a closed black box” into “the kernel is a programmable, observable, auditable system,” without compromising its stability. ...

Abstract illustration of a compiler pipeline transforming nodes into optimized machine code.

Inside the V8 TurboFan Compiler: How Speculative JIT Compilation Really Works

How TurboFan turns hot JavaScript into optimized machine code using speculation, Sea of Nodes IR, and feedback-driven inlining — and why it has to bail out so often.

Layered diagram of a copy-on-write B-tree showing page versions branching from a stable root.

Architecting Copy-on-Write B-Trees: High-Performance Snapshot Strategies for Production Databases

A practical deep dive into copy-on-write B-tree design: page versioning, root promotion, MVCC snapshots, and the GC strategies that keep production storage engines fast under write pressure.

Stylized illustration of a bloom filter grid and an LSM-tree SSTable stack.

Implementing Bloom Filters in LSM-Tree Storage Engines for High-Throughput Key Lookups

Bloom filters are the unsung hero of LSM-tree reads: a few bits per key let engines like RocksDB skip 99% of disk seeks. Here’s the math, the tradeoffs, and what to tune in production.

Abstract representation of encrypted network traffic and connection resumption between client and server.

Implementing TLS 1.3 Zero Round-Trip Resumption: Mechanisms, Pitfalls, and Production Deployment

How TLS 1.3 0-RTT resumption actually works on the wire, why replay attacks make it risky for non-idempotent requests, and the patterns real teams use to deploy it safely behind NGINX, Envoy, and HAProxy.