Tail Latency Might Matter More Than You Think (2021)

20 points by wofo


toast

This didn’t turn out to be “more important than I think”, since I think quite a lot about tail latency as is, but is decent advice regardless.

I tend to take into consideration worst case latency across the board (what if every component happens to act in the worst way possible). If you can make that scenario be in the realm of acceptability, you don’t have to worry about latency after this point.

andyc

This article is all about parallel fanout and has some tricks to address it:

The Tail at Scale (2013) - https://cacm.acm.org/research/the-tail-at-scale/

(I think it somehow influenced TailScale the company, though I’m a bit fuzzy on that)