Willy Tarreau
wtarreau.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
Willy Tarreau, creator of HAProxy and a Linux kernel contributor, writes about data structures, locking, load balancing and ARM hardware.
What HN saysCommenters point to his elastic binary trees article as an excellent explanation, and link his posts on ARM build farms and a critical review of the GuruPlug.
15HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
13stories submitted
391story points
6 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Ebtrees: Elastic Binary Trees (2011)6 people · 135 points · first shared 2018 · 10 comments on HN
- 2Real-world performance comparison of ebtree/cebtree/rbtree2 people · 66 points · first shared 2025 · 4 comments on HN
- 3The Design of Compact Elastic Binary Trees (Cebtree)2 people · 40 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 4Progressive Locks: fast, upgradable read/write locks1 people · 121 points · first shared 2018 · 3 comments on HN
- 5Making applications scalable with Load Balancing (2006)1 people · 23 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 6Look back to an end-of-life LTS kernel: 3.101 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 7Breadbee: Build your own (tiny) single board computer1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Find bugs in YOUR code using OpenCode, Llama.cpp and Qwen3.61 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9Build farm version 3 20181 people · first shared 2020
- 10Guruplug server plus don waste your1 people · first shared 2024
- 11Elastic binary trees ebtree1 people · first shared 2025
What HN people wrote when they linked it
smellia · 2019-10-31
Then you must have a look at the amazing elastic binary trees used in haproxy, the article describes their properties quite well in terms of binary search: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html
These were featured at QCon last June by one of their authors. Really great work.
owenthejumper · 2025-01-01
Elastic Binary Trees https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html…
Gys · 2024-01-01
I was curious and searched it. Seems not everybody was that impressed: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2010/05/guruplug-server-plus-don-waste-y… [2010]
netmonk · 2020-09-25
http://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2019/01/build-farm-version-3-2018.html
This is not new, this famous linux kernel developper Willy Tarreau has built severals compile farm based on arm soc to increase his patch testing workflow.
You can find very good presentation https://fr.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2017-build-farm-again-… from kernel-recipes conference about this topic.
ignoramous · 2019-10-10
One of my favourite lock-free, hash-table talks is by Dr. Cliff Click, ex-Azul Systems, presently at H2O.ai, from 6 years ago: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WYXgtXWejRM
Rust's implementation of Google's SwissTables is pretty trippy, as well: https://blog.waffles.space/2018/12/07/deep-dive-into-hashbrown
Whilst Clojure, Scala, Erlang, and Haskell use Hash Array Mapped Tries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie and its lock-free variant, Ctrie.
Speaking of exotic data-structures used widely: HAProxy's creator u/wtarreau invented Elastic-Binary tree that powers HAProxy's caches and schedulers.
Presentation: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fXuYWqWsdFQ
Blog: http://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-ebtree.html