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Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own. Most of my content in the podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering Buy me a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr 🧑‍🏫 Courses I Te ...
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winVery clever! We often call read/rcv system call to read requests from a connection, this copies data from kernel receive buffer to user space which has a cost. This new patch changes this to allow zero copy with notification. “Reading' data out of a socket instead becomes a “notification”…
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Cloudflare built a global cache purge system that runs under 150 ms. This is how they did it. Using RockDB to maintain local CDN cache, and a peer-to-peer data center distributed system and clever engineering, they went from 1.5 second purge, down to 150 ms. However, this isn’t full picture, because that 150 ms is just actually the P50. In this vid…
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course https://databases.winMySQL has been having bumpy journey since 2018 with the release of the version 8.0. Critical crashes that made to the final product, significant performance regressions, and tons of stability and bugs issues. In this video I explore what happened to MySql, are these issues getti…
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winIn this video I use strace a performance tool that measures how many system calls does a process makes. We compare a simple task of reading from a file, and we run the program in different runtimes, namely nodejs, buns , python and native C. We discuss the cost of kernel mode switches, sy…
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.comWhen do you use threads?I would say in scenarios where the task is either 1) IO blocking task2) CPU heavy3) Large volume of small tasksIn any of the cases above, it is favorable to offload the task to a thread.1) IO blocking taskWhen you read from or write to disk, depending on ho…
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I am fascinated by how timeouts affect backend and frontend programming. When a party is waiting on something you can place a timeout to break the wait. This is useful for freeing resources to more critical processes, detecting slow operations and even avoiding DOS attacks. Contrary to common beliefs, timeouts are not exclusive to request processin…
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Learn more about database and OS internals, check out my courses Fundamentals of database engineering https://databases.win Fundamentals of operating systems https://oscourse.win This new PostgreSQL 17 feature is game changer. You see, postgres like most databases work with fixed size pages. Pretty much everything is in this format, indexes, table …
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.comWhy Windows Kernel connects slower than Linux I explore the behavior of TCP/IP stack in Windows kernel when it receives a RST from the backend server especially when the host is available but the port we are trying to connect to is not. This behavior is exacerbated by having both …
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In this episode of the backend engineering show I describe an interesting bug I ran into where the web server ran out of ephemeral ports causing the system to halt. 0:00 Intro 0:30 System architecture 2:20 The behavior of the bug 4:00 Backend Troubleshooting 7:00 The cause 15:30 Ephemeral ports on loopback…
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.comLinux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.In this video I explore this with a focus on what zerocopy. 0:00 Intro0:30 IO_uring gets faster 2:00 What is io_uring7:00 How Normal…
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winLooks like fedora is compiling cpython with the -o3 flag, which does aggressive function inlining among other optimizations.This seems to improve python benchmarks performance by at most 1.16x at a cost of an extra 3MB in binary size (text segment). Although it does seem to slow down some…
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https://oscourse.win Allegro improved their Kafka produce tail latency by over 80% when they switched from ext4 to xfs. What I enjoyed most about this article is the detailed analysis and tweaking the team made to ext4 before considering switching to xfs. This is a classic case of how a good tech blog looks like in my opinion. 0:00 Intro 0:30 Summa…
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Get my backend course https://backend.win Google submitted a patch to Linux Kernel 6.8 to improve TCP performance by 40%, this is done via rearranging the tcp structures for better cpu cache lines, I explore this here.0:00 Intro0:30 Google improves Linux Kernel TCP by 40%1:40 How CPU Cache Line Works6:45 Reviewing the Google Patchhttps://www.phoron…
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Get my backend course https://backend.win Cloudflare has announced they are opening sources Pingora as a networking framework! Big news, let us discuss 0:00 Intro 0:30 Reasons why Cloudflare built Pingora? 3:00 It is a framework! 7:30 What in Pingora? 11:50 Security in Pingora 13:45 Multi-threading in Pingora 21:00 Customization vs Configuration 25…
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https://backend.win https://databases.win I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Everything goes to pages of fixed…
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Fragmentation is a very interesting topic to me, especially when it comes to memory. While virtually memory does solve external fragmentation (you can still allocate logically contiguous memory in non-contiguous physical memory) it does however introduce performance delays as we jump all over the physical memory to read what appears to us for examp…
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Nir Kossovsky, CEO of Steel City RE and reputational risk management expert, as they discuss reputational risk management approaches for the third sector. Relevant links: Time Stamp, Topic, URL 08:30 Prediction: Resilience Monitor https://steelcityre.com/predict-reputation-risk/ 10:11 2022 Νobel Prize in Economics – …
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.com Why create Index blocks writesIn this video I explore how create index, why does it block writes and how create index concurrently work and allow writes.0:00 Intro1:28 How Create Index works4:45 Create Index blocking Writes5:00 …
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Rachel Erskine, an ethical storytelling advisor and co-chair of the BOND People in the Pictures Working group, and they discuss the importance of ethical storytelling and fundraising in the third-sector. Resources for this episode: Practical guidance The Dignified Storytelling project (2022) Guidelines for ethical co…
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Dr. Warren Black, a complex systems and risk expert, and they discuss how complexity, systems thinking, and risk impact the third sector. You can find the complexity matrix we discuss on the episode here. You can find Dr. Black's YouTube channel here - https://youtube.com/@warrenblack4700?si=of8i9HsBmWRhTTHr…
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The Encrypted Client Hello or ECH is a new RFC that encrypts the TLS client hello to hide sensitive information like the SNI. In this video I go through pros and cons of this new rfc.0:00 Intro2:00 SNI4:00 Client Hello8:40 Encrypted Client Hello11:30 Inner Client Hello Encryption18:00 Client-Facing Outer SNI21:20 Decrypting Inner Client Hello23:30 …
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Isabel de Bruin Cardoso - a third-sector ethics and safeguarding expert - and they discuss the risks of unethical behavior and the "halo-effect" in the third-sector. References for this episode: Contact details: debruin@rsm.nl More info: NGO Soul & Strategy podcast Principia Advisory Website Articles: The NGO Halo Ef…
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Claris D'cruz, a third-sector governance expert, and they discuss strategy, governance, and risk in the third sector. Relevant links for this episode: https://www.gov.uk/government/5-minute-guides-for-charity-trustees https://www.gettingonboard.org/ https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/trustee-learning-programme-getting-o…
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From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process When we send a request to a backend most of us focus on the processing aspect of the request which is really just the last step. There is so much more happening before a request is ready to be processed, most of this step happens in the Kernel. I break this into 6 steps, each step can theo…
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In a wonderful blog, Kyle explores the pains he faced managing a Postgres instance for a startup he works for and how enabling partitioning sigintfically created wait events causing the backend and subsequently NGINX to through 500 errors.We discuss this in this video/podcasthttps://www.kylehailey.com/post/postgres-partition-pains-lockmanager-waits…
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WebTransport is a cutting-edge protocol framework designed to support multiplexed and secure transport over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. It brings together the best of web and transport technologies, providing an all-in-one solution for real-time, bidirectional communication on the web. Watch full episode (subscribers only) https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link…
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Elyse Wallnutt, Founder - Agility Lab Consulting, and they discuss the impact data protection has specifically on the marketing and fundraising efforts of third-sector organizations. Books referenced: The Fight for Privacy by Danielle Kats Citron Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble LinkedIn: www.linkedin.c…
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fsync is a linux system call that flushes all pages and metadata for a given file to the disk. It is indeed an expensive operation but required for durability especially for database systems. Regular writes that make it to the disk controller are often placed in the SSD local cache to accumulate more writes before getting flushed to the NAND cells.…
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.com In version 5.3, MongoDB introduced a feature called clustered collection which stores documents in the _id index as oppose to the hidden wiredTiger hidden index. This eliminates an entire b+tree seek for reads using the _id inde…
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Prime video engineering team has posted a blog detailing how they moved their live stream monitoring service from microservices to a monolith reducing their cost by 90%, let us discuss this0:00 Intro2:00 Overview10:35 Distributed System Overhead21:30 From Microservices to Monolith 29:00 Scaling the Monolith32:30 Takeawayshttps://www.primevideotech.…
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Veronica LaFemina, Founder and CEO of LaFamina & Co., and they discuss strategy execution and the threats and opportunities that are associated with this in the third sector. References for this episode My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlafemina LaFemina & Co. website: lafemina.co LaFemina & Co. Blog Post -- …
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.comIn a row-store database engine, rows are stored in units called pages. Each page has a fixed header and contains multiple rows, with each row having a record header followed by its respective columns. When the database fetches a …
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Join Sabrina as she speaks with Niki Wood, an international development MEL expert, and they discuss how monitoring, evaluation, and learning, and risk have more in common then you might think. References and citations for this episode are: Rogers, P. J. (2008). Using Programme Theory to Evaluate Complicated and Complex Aspects of Interventions. Ev…
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