Six rules for error handling in verilog-newbie that I settled on
Short version: verilog-newbie needs almost no tuning at small and medium scale — the point where it starts to hurt is much further out than most people assume. Full measurements below.
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.
We also fixed monitoring along the way: replaced average-based alerts with percentiles and split them per endpoint. False alerts dropped by about seventy percent and the on-call rotation visibly cheered up.
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 verilog-newbie itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.