40 articles tagged with Performance.
We moved a rewrite-heavy request path off Lambda@Edge to Workers and cut p95 from 340ms to 41ms. Here's when that swap pays off and when it doesn't.
A container with a 2-core limit was pegged at 100% CPU yet running slow. The throttling counter told the real story, and it wasn't the number we set.
A 40GB index on a 6GB table was the first sign. Queries were fine until they weren't. Here's how we found the bloat and cleared it with zero downtime.
Free memory is a lie and load average doesn't see memory stalls. How Pressure Stall Information gives you a direct, early signal of memory contention — and how we wired it into alerts and autoscaling.
The cache-control header most teams under-use. How stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error turned our CDN from a freshness liability into a latency and resilience win — with the gotchas.
Most CI caches either miss constantly or restore stale junk. The cache-key discipline, scope boundaries, and measurements that turned our pipeline cache from theatre into real minutes saved.
Horizontal and vertical autoscalers solve different problems and break in different ways. The thresholds, cooldowns, and conflicts we learned the hard way.
The single most useful Postgres extension you might not be using. The queries it surfaces, the indexes it implies, and the operational discipline of reading it weekly.
io_uring replaces epoll for new high-throughput services. The patterns that earn their place, the gotchas in older kernels, and where we'd still pick epoll.
Three caching patterns, three failure modes. The one we use most, the one that bit us, and the rule that decides which pattern fits which workload.
cpu.shares vs cpu.cfs_quota_us vs memory.max — the cgroup mechanics behind Kubernetes resource limits, and the surprises that explain the weird symptoms you've seen.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE output is dense and intimidating. Once you can read it, most slow-query investigations finish in minutes. The patterns we keep seeing.
