I’m actually surprised that they use some beefy servers. Like, Google famously use shitty and cheap commonplace hardware, but in large numbers, so it’s easy to replace when it croaks.

Most probably off-the-shelf hardware, but with software optimized out the wazoo. Like, reading directly from SSDs instead of using a filesystem. Or more likely using an in-memory database like Redis, perhaps with custom additions.

I knew a guy who went on to work for CloudFlare. Back at that job, he made a write-only static-file storage in Node.js, dumping the contents into a giant file bypassing the filesystem and its metadata overhead. That’s the kind of optimization you want — pretty similar to what database engines like MySQL/PostgreSQL do (iirc one of them does in fact support using a plain disk partition for the database).

Back in early-mid 2010s I’ve read an article on Youporn’s architecture. They ran Redis behind Haproxy load balancers. An in-memory database, behind load balancers. Some people say that it’s normal, but I’ve never had conditions calling for such a thing instead of just sharding harder.

I still can’t figure out installing Audacious. Keeps telling me the package requires dependancies, but won’t install them.

Does it say which ones? Is Audacious itself installed?

Some pseudofiles under /proc are only readable by the user running the process, and of course root can read everything. So it’s the standard Unix security model, afaics.

For example, any process’ command-line arguments are famously visible to everyone, while the environment variables only to the user of the process.

That raises the question of how their ps, top, lsof and such work, since afaik in Linux they read from /proc.

P.S. Looks like BSDs tug at the kernel via syscalls, namely sysctl and also the ‘kvm interface’ in the case of MacOS (not sure what ‘kvm’ thing is meant here). Seems vaguely reasonable, since procfs also queries the kernel for the info, so about the same resources would be used, perhaps even with the overhead of filesystem traversal and string-numbers conversion.

These days there can be a dozen virtual filesystems doing various stuff. If you ever want to get quite baffled, install a terminal emulator on an Android phone (not Termux) and run mount.

Mercedes doesn’t get paid by Germany to build more cars to sell in China

Maybe Germany should try that a bit, but with the condition that the wonderful AUTOSAR is killed.

So all the USians celebrating that Russia is cut off from Western trade and SWIFT, and that its economy is failing, are huge assholes?