39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
6 articles matching “Caching”
Architecture Decisions20 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of the whole cache stack: CPU L1/L2/L3, TLB, OS page cache, DB buffer pool, in-process LRU (Caffeine), distributed cache (Redis/Memcached), HTTP cache + ETags, CDN edge, browser, DNS, reverse proxies, query plan cache.
Query Optimization15 min read
We're trained to demand our data structures be correct — so here's one that's wrong on purpose, and runs inside Cassandra, RocksDB, Bigtable, most CDNs, and your browser's malware check.
Observability16 min read
The bell curve taught you the average is a fair summary and outliers are rare. In software both halves are false: latencies, key popularity, file sizes and follower counts are heavy-tailed power laws where the outliers…
Picking the Right DB15 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of how Redis really handles TTLs. Why TTL=0 doesn't free memory. The two strategies — lazy (on-access) and active (the random-sample-and-25%-threshold sampler).
Architecture Decisions20 min read
SVG-backed walkthrough: ring hotspots, successor overload when a node dies, and two ring generations during deploy.
Scaling & Infra20 min read
Not a "what is Lambda" post. A deep dive into how Lambda actually works: Firecracker microVMs and the Worker/placement fleet, how invocations get routed on the warm vs cold path, and what the INIT phase really does (and…