Infrastructure
A newly deployed subdomain took 8.1 seconds to first byte, then was fast. We broke container cold start into five measured phases. The whole in-process budget is 448 ms. The seconds live outside the process — in the image pull and the healthcheck interval.
Infrastructure
No. On a small flat object structuredClone runs at 1.28M ops/sec against JSON's 2.07M, and a five-line hand-written deep copy beats both at 8.71M — 6.8x faster than the native call. Use structuredClone anyway, because the fast one silently turns a Date into an empty object and stack-overflows on a c
Infrastructure
About 2 microseconds of CPU and 238 bytes of disk per line — and five log lines per request cut a Node 23 server from 68,722 to 46,059 requests per second. Measured: cost per call by log style, the argument-evaluation trap that costs 1,859 ns per disabled debug call, whether stdout blocks the event
Infrastructure
We benchmarked the same Node workload natively and in a container on an M3 Mac. CPU, memory and container-to-container networking were free. A bind mount cost 30x against a named volume. Almost none of that is Docker's fault — it is the Linux VM macOS runs it in, and on Linux most of this article do
Infrastructure
Measured on Postgres 16 at ten million rows. An exact COUNT(*) reads every visible tuple - 113,637 buffers, about 26 nanoseconds a row - and no index removes that. The estimate everyone reaches for, reltuples, was 23% wrong at the moment I needed it; the one nobody mentions was 0.008% wrong.
Infrastructure
We measured plain HTTP against HTTPS on Node 23 over loopback, where there is no network to hide behind. A full TLS 1.3 handshake costs 0.20 ms of server CPU, steady-state throughput costs 23% on small responses, and session resumption — the thing everyone reaches for — saved nothing measurable.
Infrastructure
Brotli, but at quality 4 or 5 — never the default 11. Measured on Node 23 with node:zlib over realistic JSON. Brotli q4 produced a smaller 200 KB response than gzip -6 in 0.82 ms against 1.39 ms; brotli's default q11 took 179 ms for the same body, and 5.2 to 6.6 seconds for a 5 MB export. Includes t
Infrastructure
SQLite in WAL mode committed 21,066 single-row inserts per second from one process, 3.7x what Postgres 16 managed on the same laptop. The second concurrent writer halved it and multiplied the worst commit from 1.1 ms to 237 ms. That tail, not throughput, is the ceiling.
Infrastructure
Measured on Postgres 16 at one million rows: every extra btree index costs 76 bytes of WAL per row written and about 1.5 microseconds per inserted row. One index halved insert throughput; eight left 8 percent of it. But on two of the four write paths the extra indexes cost exactly nothing.
Infrastructure
Measured on Postgres 16 at one million rows. SELECT * reads exactly the same buffers as a narrow select, costs nothing on a cached primary-key lookup, and then costs 5x warm and up to 700x cold the moment it steps off a covering index. EXPLAIN ANALYZE hides most of the bill.
Infrastructure
We swept a read-mostly workload from 5 to 400 concurrent connections against a fixed CPU allocation on Postgres 16. Throughput peaks at about four times the core count. Past that, throughput degrades gently and latency degrades catastrophically — and the number that actually justifies a pooler is 2.
Infrastructure
Measured on Postgres 16 at one million rows: jsonb costs 2.3x on disk and 1.4x on point lookups, both survivable. The number that actually hurts is the update path — one index on a jsonb column kills every HOT update and multiplies WAL by 7.8x, even when the update never touches the indexed field.