Top all-time · #12177
Alex Saveau
Personal blog · alexsaveau.dev/blogprogrammingsystems
Alex Saveau's personal blog at alexsaveau.dev covers programming and systems. Since 2021, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Fast Unix Commands”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Saveau's performance-engineering posts, on fast parallel file operations and lock-free concurrent queues. One thread discusses his argument that MPMC queues are not queues and can be replaced by bags.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Relentless efficiency
Most-linked posts?
- Fast Unix Commands3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-25
- Show HN: A scalable clipboard manager for Linux3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-10
- The need for new instructions: atomic bit fill and drain2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-28
What Hacker News says?
Try this: https://alexsaveau.dev/blog/projects/performance/files/fuc/f... > The key insight is that file operations in separate directories don’t (for the most part) interfere with each other, enabling parallel execution. It really is magically fast. EDIT: Sorry, that tool is only for local copies. I just remembered you're doing remote copies. Still worth keeping in mind.
Comment linking /blog/projects/performance/files/fuc/fast-unix-commands
on “CDC File Transfer”Submitted The fastest way to copy a file? as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI took the article to be saying that mpmc queues are not queues so we can use bags instead because bags are faster. The second claim seems dubious to me though. I checked out the repo which led me to https://alexsaveau.dev/blog/opinions/performance/lockness/at... which proposes new CPU instructions to create atomic bitmasks. As the author notes, the bag structure breaks down a bit because you have to operate on the…
Comment linking /blog/opinions/performance/lockness/atomic-bit-fill
on “Lockless MPSC/SPMC/MPMC queues are not queues”Submitted Lockless MPSC/SPMC/MPMC queues are not queues as a story · 39 points
HN discussionhttps://alexsaveau.dev/blog Mostly about performance and project internals.
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Compacting log storage for clipboard history as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI made something similar a while back where you can set your own start and end time for the "day": https://alexsaveau.dev/10hrday The point was to be able to divide the day into nicely sized bites for getting stuff done. I chose 10 minutes in an hour for that reason: you can get a small task done in one "minute."
Comment linking /10hrday
on “Metric Time”Submitted Show HN: A scalable clipboard manager for Linux as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAdded a small clarification: "The intuition here is that directories are a shared resource for their direct children and must therefore serialize concurrent directory-modifying operations, causing contention. In brief, file creation or deletion cannot occur at the same time within one directory." Plus accompanying benchmark: https://alexsaveau.dev/blog/projects/performance/files/fuc/f... --- > file operations are (a…
Comment linking /blog/projects/performance/files/fuc/fast-unix-commands
on “The fastest rm command and one of the fastest cp commands”Submitted The need for new instructions: atomic bit fill and drain as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe story around this project is a bit of a weird tangent. I'm working on another project (not ready to share) that uses tokio and needs to delete a bunch of files. I was surprised to discover that tokio's remove_dir_all implementation forwards to the stdlib, meaning it is completely sequential. To squeeze out every ounce of performance, I decided to write a crate that deletes files in parallel as fast as possible (…
Comment linking /blog/projects/performance/files/ftzz/file-tree-fuzzer
on “Show HN: A pseudo-random directory hierarchy generator written in Rust”Submitted Fast Unix Commands as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted First commit tests for broken behavior and then fix it as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ringboard: Clipboard Manager for Linux Written in Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Automate deleting old Google emails and calendar events as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ringboard: The infinitely scalable clipboard manager for Linux as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The fastest rm command and one of the fastest cp commands as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A CLI app that sandboxes processes’ file operations as a story · 1 points
HN discussion