Query and index review
One week against your slowest twenty queries, with the explain plans, the index changes and the ones that should be rewritten instead. Written up, not a call.
USD 3800.00
Notes on systems that were slow until they were not
Eleven years of writing about databases, queues and the unfashionable middle of the stack. No newsletter, no course, no sponsored posts.
Latest posts
EverythingWritten after the incident, not during the hype
Everything here has been in production somewhere, usually for at least a year before it was written up.
The posts are long because the interesting part is always the constraint that made the obvious answer wrong. There is no tracking beyond server logs, nothing is behind an email address, and if a post is wrong it gets a correction at the top rather than a quiet edit.
Work I take
Queue and backpressure audit
Where the work piles up, what happens when a consumer dies, and whether your retries are making the outage longer.
USD 5200.00
Caching strategy
What to cache, for how long, and how it gets invalidated without a deploy. Most of the value is in the invalidation.
USD 4400.00
Incident review facilitation
I run the postmortem as an outsider so nobody in the room has to. Blameless in practice, not just on the template.
USD 2600.00
- 214
- 2014
- 0
- 2
Hardware, mostly
What clients and readers say
p99 went from four seconds to under three hundred milliseconds in a week.
- The retries post saved us in the middle of an incident.
- Facilitated our worst postmortem. Nobody got blamed and we fixed the cause.
- Long posts. Worth it, but block out the time.
- Eleven years and the old URLs still work. That is rarer than it should be.
- Told me my problem was a hiring problem and refused the engagement.
- Only two slots a quarter, so plan ahead.
If the queue is the problem, I have probably seen your queue
A paragraph about what is slow and what you have already tried is enough to start. I answer everything within a week, including no.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions and work enquiries all land in the same place. I answer everything within a week.
Kingston, Saint Andrew