Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

HTTP/3 is getting popular in the cloud scene but before you migrate to HTTP/3 consider its cost. I explore it here.

From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process
When we send a request to a backend most of us focus on the processing aspect of the request which is really just the last step.

There is so much more happening before a request is ready to be processed, most of this step happens in the Kernel. I break this into 6 steps, each step can theoretically be executed by a dedicated thread or process. Pretty much all backends, web servers, proxies, frameworks and even databases have to do all these steps and they all do choose to do it differently.

Grab my backend performance course https://performance.husseinnasser.com

0:00 Intro

3:50 What is a Request?

10:14 Step 1 - Accept 

21:30 Step 2 - Read

29:30 Step 3 - Decrypt

34:00 Step 4 - Parse

40:36 Step 5 - Decode

43:14 Step 6 - Process

Medium article

https://medium.com/@hnasr/the-journey-of-a-request-to-the-backend-c3de704de223

WebTransport is a cutting-edge protocol framework designed to support multiplexed and secure transport over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. It brings together the best of web and transport technologies, providing an all-in-one solution for real-time, bidirectional communication on the web.

Watch full episode (subscribers only) https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/cTSGkq5XuAb

fsync is a linux system call that flushes all pages and metadata for a given file to the disk. It is indeed an expensive operation but required for durability especially for database systems. Regular writes that make it to the disk controller are often placed in the SSD local cache to accumulate more writes before getting flushed to the NAND cells.

ego is the main problem to a defective software product. the ego of the engineer or the tech lead seeps into the quality of the product.

In version 5.3, MongoDB introduced a feature called clustered collection which stores documents in the _id index as oppose to the hidden wiredTiger hidden index. This eliminates an entire b+tree seek for reads using the _id index and also removes the additional write to the hidden index speeding both reads and writes. 

However like we know in software engineering, everything has a cost. This feature does come with a few that one must be aware of before using it. In this video I discuss the following 

Prime video engineering team has posted a blog detailing how they moved their live stream monitoring service from microservices to a monolith reducing their cost by 90%, let us discuss this