Built a visual debugging panel for pwa-interview over the weekend
Some background first. Our setup is pwa-interview plus three downstream services, seven figures of daily requests, peaking around nine in the evening.
Order of investigation, by return on effort: 1. Check downstream latency first — usually it is not your problem 2. Then pool hit rate and wait-queue length 3. Only then GC and allocation 4. Suspect the framework last
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.
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 pwa-interview 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.