Why does clojure-jobs use twice the memory of comparable tools?
Some background first. Our setup is clojure-jobs plus three downstream services, seven figures of daily requests, peaking around nine in the evening.
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.
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 clojure-jobs itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.
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".