Engineering Notes

Occasional writing on backend systems, databases and infrastructure.

Connection pooling under memory pressure

What actually happens when a pooler and the database disagree about how many connections are reasonable.

Notes on write-ahead logging

A short walkthrough of checkpoint tuning and why the defaults are rarely wrong.

Reading latency histograms correctly

Averages hide the interesting part. A practical look at percentiles and coordinated omission.

Small servers, careful budgets

Running a real workload on a single core without pretending the constraints do not exist.