agent-design logging: what separates "readable" from "usable"
It took me two weeks of on-and-off digging and plenty of wrong turns. Writing the process down as it happened so the next person spends less time.
One last trap: in container environments remember to adjust the memory-related parameters in step. Otherwise the host limit and the process expectation disagree, and the symptom is intermittent, unreproducible failure.
# Load test: do not jump straight to the max concurrency. # Ramp it up, otherwise you miss the knee. for c in 50 100 200 400 800; do wrk -t8 -c$c -d60s --latency http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/feed sleep 20 done
What genuinely surprised me was the tail. The average looked great while P99 jumped by an order of magnitude past some threshold. The cause was not agent-design itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.
The first thing was to collapse the variables. We were changing config and upgrading the version at the same time, and afterwards nobody could say which change caused what. We rolled back to moving one variable at a time, re-ran three times, and only then did the curve settle. Tedious, but not skippable.
On trade-offs, my view is this: if nobody on the team owns this area long-term, do not introduce a second mechanism. With two coexistence you first have to work out which one is even in play when things break, and that costs far more than the performance you saved.