In the last blog post, we spoke about How we scaled for IPL 2021. A key outcome we had aimed for was to provide Quality of Service (QoS) during peak IPL load. …

This post talks about backups and snapshot restores in AWS and how does it impact the performance of a database — This post covers volume snapshots with AWS as an example, but the concepts are generic and can be applied anywhere. Persistent Storage of Database Instances A database instance like MySQL or PostgresSQL normally uses a storage volume on which the data directory is mounted.

Pipelining and multiplexing, both suffer from head-of-line blocking. But what is head-of-line blocking and how does it impact the performance in HTTP? — Head-of-line blocking or HOL blocking is a generic term in computer science that refers to a performance-limiting phenomenon that occurs when a line of packets is held up by the first packet. It can occur in network devices, transport protocols (for eg, in HTTP pipelining), or distributed systems (for eg…

This post is about an interesting discussion that came up recently. There was a problem faced to which DNS-aware persistent http connections seemed to be a probable solution. I can understand if you have never heard of such a concept before, probably because its not so common or probably it…

Databases and Indexing All sorts of databases or datastores provide some or the other king of indexing for the data they hold. Indexes provide a way, given a value for the indexed field, to find the record or records with that field value. A primary index is a clustered index on the primary…

Latency from a general point of view is a time delay between the cause and the effect of some physical change in the system being observed. Request rate, error rate and request duration or latencies ( RED) are some of the key metrics which are commonly monitored in any online…

Canaries were once regularly used in coal mining as an early warning system. Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, methane or carbon dioxide in the mine would kill the bird before affecting the miners. Signs of distress from the bird indicated to the miners that conditions were unsafe. Deployment of Microservices A very…