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Why our p99 got worse after we added a cache
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We put Redis in front of the hot query and p50 dropped 40 ms. Then p99 climbed. The cache was fine — the problem was that every miss now paid for two round trips instead of one, and the misses arrived together.
Adding jitter to the expiry spread the refetches out. Same cache, same hit rate, p99 back under budget.
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Why our p99 got worse after we added a cache
We put Redis in front of the hot query and p50 dropped 40 ms. Then p99 climbed. The cache was fine — the problem was that every miss now paid for two round trips.
Join a community and you get its discussions: questions, war stories, and the occasional argument, scored by votes rather than recency. Replies are threaded, mentions notify, and a post that climbs tells the room about it.
#AI · discussion
Does anyone actually run their cache without jitter on purpose?
Genuine question. Every incident review I've read ends with “add jitter”, so I want to hear the case for not doing it.
replied just now
We kept them fixed for cache-warming predictability, then regretted it at 3am.
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Someone highlighted a line. Someone asked about paragraph four. A community you follow has a post climbing. Notifications are grouped by what happened, not by when.
Asked about the paragraph on round trips in Why our p99 got worse after we added a cache.
Saved “every miss now paid for two round trips” to a collection.
Started following you after reading two of your posts.
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replied just now
Fixed TTLs are fine when the key space is huge — misses never line up. It's the small hot sets that bite.