39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
13 articles matching “ORM”
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.
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).
Picking the Right DB22 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of Log-Structured Merge Trees: MemTable + WAL durability, SSTable layout with sparse index and bloom filters, the L0→Ln level hierarchy, leveled vs tiered vs FIFO compaction, the three…
Query Optimization18 min read
Every team ships with the same lie: throw everything on the database and it'll handle correctness. Works at 50 writes/sec.
Schema Design14 min read
A plain-English walkthrough: how B-tree inserts actually work, what a page split costs, why random UUID v4 keys bloat the index by 2× and blow the buffer pool.
Production Incidents16 min read
When the Garbage Collector pauses, every thread freezes — zero requests, zero responses. This post explains how GC actually works: the heap, mark-and-sweep, minor vs major collections, Stop-the-World pauses, and what…
Performance14 min read
Why your connection pool config is probably wrong — and how to fix it with Little's Law, Kingman's Formula, and the process-to-core ratio.
Schema Design12 min read
Why DELETE is the most expensive DML operation in a relational database — and why a simple UPDATE SET deleted_at = NOW() is 4-8x faster under concurrent load.
Query Optimization18 min read
A deep-dive into non-SARGable SQL with B-tree diagrams, real EXPLAIN output, and the exact rewrites — told through a gaming dashboard that went from 4,200ms to 2ms without touching the schema.
Production Incidents45 min read
A payment commits, the API returns 200, the rack loses power, and after recovery the row does not exist. Before blaming the database, six questions have to be separated.
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…
Query Optimization13 min read
“We sold 3 tickets but only had 1.” The code is inside a transaction, looks right, works a hundred times locally, and only breaks in production under load.
Architecture Decisions20 min read
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 —…