> Internally, OTEL has to keep track of every combination of labels it's seen since process start, which can easily come to dominate the processing time in an e

> Internally, OTEL has to keep track of every combination of labels it's seen since process start, which can easily come to dominate the processing time in an existing project. Well, every unique combination of labels represents a discrete time series of telemetry data, and the total set of all time series in your entire organization always has to be of finite and reasonable cardinality. This means that label values always have to be finite e.g. enumerations, and never e.g. arbitrary values from user input. > my overall software development philosophy which is that you can make pretty much any process work for 18 months before the wheels fall off. The size of the set of labels in your process after (say) 1d of regular traffic should be basically the same size as after (say) 18m of regular traffic. If this isn't the case, it usually signals that you're stuffing invalid data into label values.