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Alex Chen

Systems software engineer writing about high-performance Linux kernel networking, eBPF telemetry, memory concurrency models, and distributed reliability.

All Posts Linux & Kernel Distributed Systems Go Runtime Performance Architecture

Understanding Memory Consistency Models in Modern Multicore CPUs

A deep dive into Sequential Consistency, Total Store Order (TSO on x86-64), and weak memory models on ARM64. How hardware store buffers and cache coherency protocols dictate lock-free algorithm correctness.

Zero-Copy Packet Steering with eBPF and AF_XDP in Production

How we bypassed the Linux kernel network stack overhead using XDP (eXpress Data Path) and UMEM memory-mapped ring buffers, achieving line-rate 10Gbps packet filtering with under 3% CPU utilization.

Taming p99.99 Tail Latency in High-Throughput Go Microservices

Practical lessons from diagnosing GC pacing pauses, lock contention on channel multiplexers, and using arena allocators and sync.Pool to reduce garbage collection pressure on latency-critical paths.

Pragmatic Design Patterns for Idempotent Distributed RPCs

Handling duplicate network packets, retry storms, and clock drift in distributed consensus systems without relying on heavy distributed lock managers.

Selected Open Source Projects

ring-buffer-go MIT

A cache-line padded, lock-free circular ring buffer implementing SPMC and MPMC semantics in Go.

xdp-inspect Apache 2.0

Terminal UI tool for inspecting live eBPF map contents and packet counters attached to NIC queues.

quic-stat MIT

Microsecond-precision RTT and packet loss measurement daemon for QUIC and HTTP/3 streams.