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Fifty seconds for half a megabyte: the optimisation that fixed the constant, not the order

A cryptography library had a bottleneck no test could see : encrypting half a megabyte took fifty seconds. Every test passed. They had been passing for months.

  • Encryption process converted message to large integer, then divided repeatedly
  • Optimisation improved constant runtime but didn't change order of growth
  • Quadratic algorithm quadrupled execution time with doubled input size

ShrekOS Can Update Itself Now. I Know Because I Broke It First.

I have been calling ShrekOS an immutable operating system for a while now. That sounds nice. It also does not mean very much if the machine cannot safely replace itself.

  • ShrekOS now capable of self-updating
  • Reporter intentionally broke system to test update
  • Update process involves writing new system to separate slot

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