Burp Suite · Job board · Help: burpsuite-jobs fails to start intermittently in containers, logs inside

Most burpsuite-jobs articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.

-- 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.

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 burpsuite-jobs 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.

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.