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ESP32 · Code review · Help: esp32-review fails to start intermittently in containers, logs inside

114
ESr/esp32-review·posted by slow_query·1 hour agoInternals

Help: esp32-review fails to start intermittently in containers, logs inside

Most esp32-review articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.

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.

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 esp32-review itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.

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.

14 comments

14 comments

M
Ttang_hao·12 minutes ago

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

465
Nnikic·just now

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

342
Sswoole_leeOP·just now

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.

257
Sslow_query·1 hour agoedited

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.

33
Bbob_chen·5 hours agoedited

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.

21
Bbob_chen·yesterday

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.

1
Bbob_chen·3 minutes agoedited

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

152
Kkernel_panic·3 minutes ago

This is not a esp32-review problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

44
Kkite·1 hour ago

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.

498
Llinlin·1 hour agoedited

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.

1
Oops_wang·just now

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

26
Kkernel_panicMod·1 hour ago

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.

11
Mmike_xu·5 hours ago

One counter-example: below esp32-review 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

1
Wwinter·2 days ago

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

1

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