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Screaming Zombies and Other Tales: Race Condition Woes

Talkat RubyConf 2020 · 2020-11-17..11-19· [concurrency, software-architecture]
links:none on file
slides:none on file

Four concrete postmortems of production race bugs: an S3 test bucket collision where concurrent test runs overwrite step data so smurf reads the wrong file; a transaction settler that races with voids and is fixed by marking "about to settle" plus a 60s settlement timeout to let web voids complete; an IoT case where heartbeats outrun sensor messages so stale timestamps drop updates and the team chooses not to rework the data model; and zombie reporters drowning metrics from leftover reporters that keep sending zeros to statsd, fixed by stopping those reporters.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Introduction
  2. 1:10What is incrementing
  3. 5:55Story 1 Smurfs Law
  4. 10:14Story 2 Transactions
  5. 18:18Story 3 Fix
  6. 22:40Story 4 Screaming Zombies
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