Load Balancing15 min read
Load Balancer Explained: L4 vs L7 — What the Door-Person Actually Sees
A simple, ground-up guide: L4 forwards raw TCP/UDP by IP and port, L7 opens the HTTP request and routes by URL, host, headers or cookies.
Writing
39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
4 articles matching “Load Balancing”
WebSockets & Real-time20 min read
Slack Sends Messages Over HTTP, Not Its WebSocket — and the Durability Bug That Forced the Switch
When you press Enter in Slack, the message does not travel over the WebSocket your client is holding open — it goes out as a separate HTTPS POST to chat.
Tradeoffs in Production16 min read
TCP Keep-Alive vs Application Heartbeat — Three Different Things Called “Keep-Alive”
Kernel TCP keep-alive probes the network path; app heartbeats prove the peer process is serving; HTTP Connection: keep-alive only reuses sockets.
Architecture Decisions20 min read
C10K vs C10M: Two Scaling Problems People Confuse for One
A beginner-friendly walkthrough: what “concurrent” means, what the C10K and C10M problems actually are, how the industry usually fixes them (event loops vs whole-system design), and what still goes wrong in production —…