Choosing tableau-review: I turned 5 options into a side-by-side comparison
Most tableau-review articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.
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
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 tableau-review 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".
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.
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.