Blog

• Timeouts that get retried into an outage

  How a 1 second client timeout and two automatic retries turn a slow invoice query into overlapping work that fills the database and takes checkout down.

• Indexes that fix one page and break another

  Why a composite index that rescues one SaaS screen can reshape plans for exports, writes, and sibling queries on the same table.

• Connection pools that look healthy until Monday morning

  Why pool dashboards stay green through a quiet weekend and fail the moment Monday concurrency returns, and what to measure instead of average utilization.

• Cache stampedes in SaaS: symptoms and boring fixes

  How synchronized cache misses overload SaaS origins, what the fingerprint looks like in metrics, and the dull coordination fixes that usually stop the cascade.

• N+1 queries in ORMs: how they still show up in mature codebases

  Why mature SaaS codebases keep rediscovering N+1 query patterns, how they hide outside the obvious controller loop, and which fixes hold up under real tenant data.

• What RAG teams keep learning about production latency that perf engineers already knew

  A guest post from the lesspoo team on the five performance-engineering lessons that translate directly from older production systems to the current generation of RAG.

• Where performance hides in a typical SaaS rendering path

  An honest tour of the parts of a SaaS application's rendering path that produce most of the user-perceived slowness, and the small set of changes that produce the largest improvements.

• When a slow query is a database problem and when it is not

  How to diagnose whether the slow query the team is staring at is actually a database issue or a symptom of something further upstream.