Fortran · Resources · The edge cases the fortran-resources docs never spell out

98
FOr/fortran-resources·posted by ran_bo·3 hours agoPostmortem

The edge cases the fortran-resources docs never spell out

Most fortran-resources 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 fortran-resources 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.

11 comments

11 comments

M
Mmike_xu·just now

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.

441
Oops_wang·12 minutes ago

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

166
Mmike_xu·12 minutes ago

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

143
WwinterOP·2 hours ago

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

327
Zzhou_yi·28 minutes 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.

216
Oops_wangMod·3 minutes ago

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.

197
Sswoole_leeMod·28 minutes 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.

196
Wwinter·3 minutes ago

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

5
Ttang_hao·3 minutes ago

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.

1
Mmike_xuOP·5 hours ago

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.

271
Sswoole_lee·2 hours ago

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

71

This is the post detail page /en/c/fortran-resources/post/p13. Posts and comments are generated deterministically from a seeded PRNG, so the same post always renders the same content and the link can be shared, reloaded and indexed. In production this page reads MySQL for the post, Redis for hot-post caching, and fetches the whole comment tree in a single query on the path column.

See the database schema →