A Systems Engineer’s Guide to Benchmarking with RDTSC

A deep dive into rdtsc, instruction stream serialization, and memory fences for precise cycle-level performance measurement.

Oct 23 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

14

My Top 5 Favourite Features in Python 3.14

Exploring the concurrency, debugging, and performance upgrades that make Python 3.14 special.

Oct 11 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

18

2

September 2025

Understanding Weak References in Python

Understanding Python’s memory management with weak references

Sep 30 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

13

Compiling Python to Run Anywhere

A guest post on building a Python compiler that generates optimized kernels while preserving the language’s simplicity.

Sep 23 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

 and 

Yusuf Olokoba

35

7

What Makes System Calls Expensive: A Linux Internals Deep Dive

An explanation of how Linux handles system calls on x86-64 and why they show up as expensive operations in performance profiles

Sep 16 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

64

4

August 2025

How to Leverage the CPU’s Micro-Op Cache for Faster Loops

Measuring, analyzing, and optimizing loops using Linux perf, Top-Down Microarchitectural Analysis, and the CPU’s micro-op cache

Aug 15 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

19

1

45:32

Big O vs Hardware: Better Complexity ≠ Better Performance

Why Your O(log n) Algorithm Might Lose to O(n)

Aug 3 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

50

July 2025

x86 Assembly Exercise #1: Toy kill Program (Solution)

A step-by-step walkthrough of the toy kill program using raw Linux syscalls.

Jul 19 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

6

8:42

Understanding Registers and Data Movement in x86-64 Assembly

A hands-on guide to general-purpose registers and data movement in x86-64

Jul 16 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

12

A Programmer’s Guide to x86-64 Assembly (Series Overview)

Welcome to my ongoing series on x86-64 assembly programming, designed for programmers who want to peel back the abstraction and understand how code…

Jul 16 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

10

2

June 2025

Why This Python Performance Trick Doesn’t Matter Anymore

A deep dive into Python’s name resolution, bytecode, and how CPython 3.11 quietly made a popular optimization irrelevant.

Jun 28 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

24

Making System Calls in x86-64 Assembly

Watch now | Privilege levels, syscall conventions, and how assembly code talks to the Linux kernel

Jun 16 • 

Abhinav Upadhyay

18

31:44