Sharding Strategies: Partitioning Data at Scale
How query patterns, access skew, and topology changes shape the art of data partitioning
Why Exactly-Once Delivery Is Impossible
The network cannot guarantee it, but your application doesn't need it to.
Asynchronous I/O Models Compared
From select to io_uring, how each async I/O model pays its costs and what those costs buy at scale
Vector Clocks: Tracking Causality in Distributed Systems
How distributed systems track what caused what without global time
Merkle Trees: Efficient Verification at Scale
How recursive hashing transforms dataset verification from linear scans to logarithmic proofs
Rate Limiting Algorithms: Beyond Token Buckets
Understanding leaky buckets, sliding windows, and distributed coordination reveals which algorithm matches your actual requirements.
Quorum Systems: Optimizing Replication Trade-offs
Beyond majorities: the mathematics of replica coordination and the structures that scale it
Why Cache Invalidation Remains Computing's Hardest Problem
The distributed systems challenge that elegant solutions can't solve—only careful trade-offs can manage.
Tail Latency: Understanding the Long Tail
Why the slowest 1% of requests matters more than the fastest 99%, and what to do about it
The Thundering Herd Problem and Its Solutions
When thousands of clients synchronize by accident, systems collapse by design—unless you engineer decorrelation
Understanding Write-Ahead Logging Mechanics
How databases survive crashes without sacrificing the performance you expect
B-Trees vs LSM-Trees: A Performance Model
A quantitative framework for choosing storage engines based on write amplification, read patterns, and workload characteristics
Why Your Distributed Transactions Fail at Scale
Two-phase commit's theoretical limits explain why coordination overhead defeats your scaling efforts.
Lock-Free Data Structures: Beyond Compare-and-Swap
Master the advanced techniques that enable high-throughput concurrent systems without traditional locking overhead.
Consistent Hashing: The Mathematics of Elastic Scaling
How ring geometry, virtual nodes, and bounded-load algorithms transform distributed scaling from probabilistic hope into mathematical certainty.
Clock Synchronization: The Fundamental Distributed Challenge
Why perfect time agreement is impossible in distributed systems, and the sophisticated algorithms that achieve correctness anyway
Raft Consensus: Simplicity's Hidden Complexity
Discover the treacherous edge cases lurking beneath Raft's elegant protocol description that cause production consensus failures.
Why Microservices Increase Latency Variance
The hidden mathematics of fan-out, hedging, and queuing that determine whether your distributed system delivers consistent performance or unpredictable latency spikes.
Memory Barriers: What Your Compiler Hides
The hidden reorderings in your concurrent code that store buffers and compilers conspire to create—and the barriers that stop them.
Why Linearizability Costs More Than You Think
The theoretical barriers and strategic trade-offs that determine when strong consistency is worth its unavoidable performance penalty in distributed systems.
The Hidden Cost of Garbage Collection in Latency-Critical Systems
Why your carefully optimized algorithm still exhibits unpredictable latency spikes, and the architectural patterns that restore deterministic performance in garbage-collected systems.