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Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#161

Post by rvz »

kenferry wrote: post #120
rvz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these. No. This is something you shouldn't allow coding agents anywhere near, unless you have expert-level understanding required to maintain the project like the previous authors have done without an AI for years.

Hm, I wonder. I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

> ...but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

I don't think so.

Even on LLM generated code, it is still not enough and you cannot trust it. They can pass the tests and still cause a regression and the code will look seemingly correct, for example in this case study [0].

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#162

Post by eduction »

alexgartrell wrote: post #146
adsharma wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patches were written in 2011 and published in 2012. They did what they were supposed to at the time. For the peanut gallery: this is a manifestation of an internal eng culture at fb that I wasn't particularly fond of. Celebrating that "I killed X" and partying about it. You didn't reply to the main point: did you benchmark a server that was running several days at a time? Reasonable people can disagree about whet…

For the peanut gallery more: I worked with both of these guys at Meta on this. The "servers are only on for a few hours" thing was like never true so I have no idea where that claim is coming from. The web performance test took more than a few hours to run alone and we had way more aggressive soaks for other workloads. My recollection was that "write zeroes" just became a cheaper operation between '12 and '14. A fun…

[flagged]

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#163

Post by integricho »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #145
jcalvinowens wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time you joined and benchmarked these systems, the continuous rolling deployment had taken over Nope, I started in 2014. > I don't recall ever talking to you on the matter. I recall. You refused to believe the benchmark results and made me repeat the test, then stopped replying after I did :)

This is why I love hacker news. I learn so much from these moments.

I came here for the article, stayed for the drama.

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#164

Post by pabs3 »

apatheticonion wrote: post #117

As an Australian who was just made redundant from a role that involved this type of low level programming - I love working on these these kinds of challenges. I'm saddened that the job market in Australia is largely React CRUD applications and that it's unlikely I will find a role that lets me leverage my niche skill set (which is also my hobby)

Some of this remote stuff might interest you:

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/open/

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#165

Post by pabs3 »

gzread wrote: post #133
apatheticonion wrote: post #117

As an Australian who was just made redundant from a role that involved this type of low level programming - I love working on these these kinds of challenges. I'm saddened that the job market in Australia is largely React CRUD applications and that it's unlikely I will find a role that lets me leverage my niche skill set (which is also my hobby)

I have a relative in Australia who was hired by some type of consultancy to work on Samba, but I don't know what work he was doing.

Which consultancy was that?

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#166

Post by CamperBob2 »

danudey wrote: post #151
nullpoint420 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love hacker news. I learn so much from these moments.

Like "never work at Meta unless you can out-toxic your coworkers".

Like "Hey, I wonder if Conway's Law works both ways. Huh. Wow. It looks like that is indeed the case."

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#167

Post by pabs3 »

pabs3 wrote: post #164
apatheticonion wrote: post #117

As an Australian who was just made redundant from a role that involved this type of low level programming - I love working on these these kinds of challenges. I'm saddened that the job market in Australia is largely React CRUD applications and that it's unlikely I will find a role that lets me leverage my niche skill set (which is also my hobby)

Some of this remote stuff might interest you: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/open/

Or https://www.fsf.org/resources/jobs/fsf-engineering-and-certi...

Re: Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

#170

Post by __turbobrew__ »

baby wrote: post #160
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I knew meta was toxic, but publicly beefing over something over a decade ago is a whole other matter. I can’t even remember what I was working on 10 years ago, and even if I did I wouldn’t be bringing people down that much later.

The problem is a lot of very strong engineers are also very difficult to work with. I worked at Meta too and can tell you the other side of the coin is that people who were too toxic could get canned as well!

Yes, I have worked with the strong but arrogant/snarky engineers. Luckily most of them got canned or forced out because the environment they create around themselves more than negates the positive impact they have. The strongest engineers I have worked with are all humble and kind.

It is their loss, I cannot imagine letting a minor work quarrel live rent free in my head for over a decade. I feel bad enough when something is stuck in my mind for a week.

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