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5 Oct 31 7:50 PM · 11d ago · 1 post · 1 source · development 5 of 5
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Pivot Lake Database engine vendor and blog author
The whole story articlesposts the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 12 voices · verbatim
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Modern CPUs have hundreds of megabytes of cache. That's more than the entire hard disk space required by Windows in the 1990s.You could install an entire Windows system, emulated in cache of a modern CPU, including the hard disk, and modern computers are still slow, partly because the CPU does nothing while waiting for RAM to fetch data, and…
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It's the Memory Latency, Stupid Link: https:// pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memo ry-latency-stupid/ Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0318720
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Hi, i just have 2 questions. Are your machines priorizing Space over Processing ? In terms to save a few bytes, cos "Rendering" (for example) is done by the clients machine as an example? Or have i missunderstood something? I am asking, cos the first answer in the posting seem to miss: "commenting the code good enough than anyone may 'understood…
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It's the memory latency, stupid: https:// pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memo ry-latency-stupid/ Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0318720
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Someone asked me why Zig programmers seem to genuinely enjoy passing the allocator around as an argument. I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I think I do now, thanks to your comment - feeling the “weight” of allocations is an example of mechanical sympathy, and having to pass around and use an allocator explicitly makes your code-effort…
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I recently spent three weeks paring down a piece of software until it could run entirely in the L1 cache of the processor it was running on. The performance was - to put it mildly - impressive. And this was 1970's technology running on a modern CPU. This stuff can do miracles if you use it right.
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I remember have a very long argument with a team I worked on, who were mostly convinced our service couldn't handle requests any faster because the CPUs were already at 100%. In the end we tripled the requests-per-second by cleaning up the service's memory access patterns...
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Uh, isn't this just radix-partitioned aggregation? Hierarchical (fixed two level) aggregation is old. What's novel here?Microcosm of Pivot itself I guess. I just don't get why this project exists when DuckDB and Clickhouse both exist.
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https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdfHas anyone rewritten this for 2026?
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Clean code is beautiful, like a convenient lie enjoys us. Cache aware code is ugly, like a truth that hurts. Morality suggests to be honest from the beginning, there is no prematurity in aiming for cache locality.
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This blog post and some other pages in the website are really great. Just useful information without padding, even when writing about the product.
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I feel like the solution presented is just a clustered hashmap or “locality sensitive” if you’d like it.Still not orders of magnitude better.
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