Clojure · Job board · After reading the clojure-jobs core source I finally understand the trade-offs

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

This is not a clojure-jobs problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

I just read the clojure-jobs source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

This is not a clojure-jobs problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

This is not a clojure-jobs problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

This is not a clojure-jobs problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

I just read the clojure-jobs source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

One counter-example: below clojure-jobs 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

This is not a clojure-jobs problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.