HTTP/3 Benchmarks: QUIC Performance on Lossy Networks with Packet Analysis

Paul published on 2022-01-01 included in Networking

HTTP/3 replaces TCP+TLS with QUIC, claiming to solve “head-of-line blocking”. But how does it actually perform? This post uses simulated degraded networks to compare HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 with real data.

HTTPS Handshake Optimization: Cutting Latency from 200ms to 50ms

Paul published on 2021-12-26 included in Networking

Users were complaining about slow page loads. Chrome DevTools showed a TTFB (Time To First Byte) of 400ms, with HTTPS handshake alone taking 200ms. This post documents how I got that down to 50ms.

Go Singleflight Deep Dive: Preventing Cache Stampede with One Line of Code

Paul published on 2021-12-21 included in Go

In high-concurrency scenarios, cache stampede can crush your database. Singleflight solves this with an elegantly simple design.

Compiling Nginx from Source: Understanding Module Architecture and Custom Extensions

Paul published on 2021-12-06 included in Linux

Most people install Nginx via package managers, but compiling from source truly reveals its module mechanism. This post uses FastDFS module integration as an example to analyze Nginx’s build system and modular architecture.

Postmortem: Debugging a Zookeeper Split-Brain in Production

Paul published on 2021-10-14 included in Distributed Systems

One night at 2 AM, Kafka message lag alerts fired. Investigation revealed a Zookeeper cluster split-brain — two nodes both thought they were the Leader. This post documents the full debugging and recovery process.

Go Microservices War Stories: 5 Lessons from Dependency Management to Service Discovery

Paul published on 2021-09-22 included in Distributed Systems

Microservices isn’t just about splitting up a monolith. This post documents 5 real pitfalls I hit in Go microservices projects, and how to avoid them.