Top all-time · #5219
Willy Tarreau
Personal blog · wtarreau.blogspot.comsystemsprogramming
Willy Tarreau's personal blog at wtarreau.blogspot.com covers systems and programming. Since 2017, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Elastic Binary Trees (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Willy Tarreau's blog for its low-level systems and data-structure posts, such as elastic binary trees from the HAProxy work, and for his kernel build-farm and single-board computer projects.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Brain dumps. Reports about experiments, ideas, and various stuff that's more useful on the net than written on paper stacked on my desk.
Most-linked posts?
- Elastic Binary Trees (2011)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-06
- Ebtrees: Elastic Binary Trees (2011)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-25
- Real-world performance comparison of ebtree/cebtree/rbtree2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-23
- The Design of Compact Elastic Binary Trees (Cebtree)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-07
What Hacker News says?
Elastic Binary Trees https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-e...
Comment linking /2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html?m=1
on “Static search trees: faster than binary search”Submitted Progressive Locks: fast, upgradable read/write locks as a story · 121 points
HN discussionHow's https://golden.com doing? I have come across some really detailed Wikipedia articles (for sports events, for example) and at times some really drab ones which I try to edit to improve. But original research articles sometimes do contain a lot more specific information that doesn't survive editor scrutiny on Wikipedia. And the less we talk about numerous advertisment/PR/fluff articles and socio/geo-political ed…
Comment linking /2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html
on “Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English”Submitted Ebtrees: Elastic Binary Trees (2011) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionOne of my favourite lock-free, hash-table talks is by Dr. Cliff Click, ex-Azul Systems, presently at H2O.ai, from 6 years ago: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WYXgtXWejRM Rust's implementation of Google's SwissTables is pretty trippy, as well: https://blog.waffles.space/2018/12/07/deep-dive-into-hashbro... Whilst Clojure, Scala, Erlang, and Haskell use Hash Array Mapped Tries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has…
Comment linking /2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html
on “Hash tables”Submitted Real-world performance comparison of ebtree/cebtree/rbtree as a story · 52 points
HN discussionI was curious and searched it. Seems not everybody was that impressed: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2010/05/guruplug-server-plus-d... [2010]
Comment linking /2010/05/guruplug-server-plus-don-waste-your.html
on “My SBC Collection”Submitted The Design of Compact Elastic Binary Trees (Cebtree) as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThen you must have a look at the amazing elastic binary trees used in haproxy, the article describes their properties quite well in terms of binary search: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-e... These were featured at QCon last June by one of their authors. Really great work.
Comment linking /2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html
on “On Binary Search”Submitted Elastic Binary Trees (2011) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionhttp://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2019/01/build-farm-version-3-20... This is not new, this famous linux kernel developper Willy Tarreau has built severals compile farm based on arm soc to increase his patch testing workflow. You can find very good presentation https://fr.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2017-build-f... from kernel-recipes conference about this topic.
Comment linking /2019/01/build-farm-version-3-2018.html
on “Let’s Build a 28-Core Raspberry Pi Cluster”Submitted Making applications scalable with Load Balancing (2006) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionSubmitted Real-world performance comparison of ebtree/cebtree/rbtree as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Design of Compact Elastic Binary Trees (Cebtree) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Look back to an end-of-life LTS kernel: 3.10 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Elastic Binary Trees (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Find bugs in YOUR code using OpenCode, Llama.cpp and Qwen3.6 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Breadbee: Build your own (tiny) single board computer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ebtree: elastic binary trees. (Like embedded crit-bit trees.) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
