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I can highly recommend control theory to all software engineers designing high throughput systems. It is sometimes super useful to think about large systems wi
by twawaaay 4y ago
I can highly recommend control theory to all software engineers designing high throughput systems.
It is sometimes super useful to think about large systems with high traffic of requests/messages as something that can be controlled.
- WJW 4y agoMy favorite was a DB project where the DB would accept DELETEs faster than the SSD could write them to disk. The eventual solution was to implement a proportional controller that looked at the "still to be persisted to disk" backlog and kept it at ~66% of the value at which the DB would stop accepting queries by selectively inserting sleeps into the DELETE-submitting process. We could have fixed it at some known-good but low value, but implementing a controller enabled us to speed up during the night (when there was low user traffic) and still not stress the db too much when a lot of users were online.
- twawaaay 4y agoYeah, I especially like to use CT for reducing configuration parameters or to replace meaningless configuration parameters (requests per second, batch sizes) with more meaningful ones (acceptable latency, acceptable failure rate).
- lanstin 4y agoThat's a good qualification - if you aren't having to worry about these maths, you aren't doing high volume.
- agumonkey 4y agoDigital computers are turning into analog ones.