Just a shiny male toy…

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • All of what you’re saying seems correct. I think this is more of a meta discussion, on how (in this case) retries, even with exponential back off, aren’t a solution by themselves when you look at the system overall. There are interesting hidden caveats to any common solutions, this is one I personally wasn’t aware of.

    Practically, adding a timeout budget so that the clients themselves just error out (forcing a manual refresh) sorta accomplishes the same as what you’re positing.


  • Hmm… I’d say that was an obvious example to cause the situation, the real point was exposing the more subtle problems with feedback loops.

    What happens if the server in question was at 80% capacity, and due to hardware faults, that leads to 100% utilization? Can you reconfigure your services if there’s a cascading overload through enough of the system without actually adding to the system load? What do you do about the fact that these loops gets ever more powerful and sudden the larger the system?

    The author seemed to be suggesting that we carefully consider how to avoid open feedback loops, and build stability in. This article clued me in that stability problems can be borne from “industry standard” advice if you don’t carefully think about it.