Fast, but Not Too Fast! What 17th-Century Windmills Can Teach Us
summary
A short engineering talk describes a simple capacity-throttling control function (implemented in six lines of code) that paces background jobs using feedback like queue depth and database response times. The technique prevents long-running migrations from starving live traffic and avoids crashing the database, enabling teams to complete large schema changes overnight without outages.
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chapters (9)
- 0:0017th-century windmills intro
- 1:04Harnessing wind power
- 2:08Winter storm problems
- 3:10Modern windmill principles
- 4:39Speed versus stability
- 6:02Database overload crashes
- 7:29Efficient performance monitoring
- 8:55Database migration challenges
- 10:20Windmill innovation today
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