Why does app-design-news use twice the memory of comparable tools?
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.
We also fixed monitoring along the way: replaced average-based alerts with percentiles and split them per endpoint. False alerts dropped by about seventy percent and the on-call rotation visibly cheered up.
-- The query that broke: a full scan over 20M rows. -- A composite index took P99 from 1.8s down to 42ms. SELECT id, title, created_at FROM posts WHERE community_id = ? AND status = 1 ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 20;
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.
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.
Worth noting: the official docs do cover this, just in a very inconspicuous spot. I only found it reading the source comments, where the author explains the reasoning — roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".