Articles tagged with
linux

06 Mar 2024

Unlocking Kafka's Potential: Tackling Tail Latency with eBPF

At Allegro, we use Kafka as a backbone for asynchronous communication between microservices. With up to 300k messages published and 1M messages consumed every second, it is a key part of our infrastructure. A few months ago, in our main Kafka cluster, we noticed the following discrepancy: while median response times for produce requests were in single-digit milliseconds, the tail latency was much worse. Namely, the p99 latency was up to 1 second, and the p999 latency was up to 3 seconds. This was unacceptable for a new project that we were about to start, so we decided to look into this issue. In this blog post, we would like to describe our journey — how we used Kafka protocol sniffing and eBPF to identify and remove the performance bottleneck.



06 Feb 2015

High performance with low-level tools

Even though a lot of software development is high-level stuff which does not require the developer to delve into the details of how things work under the hood, in certain situations it can be very helpful to know what sort of low-level operations an application is performing. Two typical scenarios are performance tuning and debugging.