System Design Aug 4, 2026 11 min read
Database Lock Contention and Long Transactions Explained
Learn to diagnose PostgreSQL lock contention, blockers, waiters, long transactions, idle-in-transaction sessions, pool exhaustion, and safe cancellation.
Tag
Reliability
14 articles with this tag. Follow these related notes when you want a narrower study path.
System Design Aug 4, 2026 11 min read
Zero-Downtime Database Schema Migrations Explained
Learn expand-contract database migrations, compatible deploy ordering, bounded backfills, concurrent indexes, constraint validation, locking, and safe production rollout.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 11 min read
Backpressure, Bounded Queues, and Flow Control Explained
Control overload with explicit demand, bounded buffering, queue age, rejection, expiry, and end-to-end flow policies across APIs, streams, and brokers.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Graceful Degradation and Fallback Design Explained
Design explicit fallback modes that preserve business invariants, authorization, freshness contracts, and observable recovery under dependency failure.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Health Checks Explained
Design Kubernetes startup, liveness, and readiness probes that route safely, recover local deadlocks, and avoid overload-driven restart storms.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Load Shedding and Adaptive Concurrency Limits Explained
Protect backend latency and useful throughput with explicit admission, deliberate load shedding, and evidence-tuned concurrency limits.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 12 min read
Observability for Backend Systems Explained
Learn how logs, metrics, traces, and events work together to diagnose backend failures, protect telemetry quality, and verify recovery.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 11 min read
Production Incident Troubleshooting with Logs, Metrics, and Traces
Follow an evidence-driven incident runbook from SLO alert and triage through metrics, traces, logs, mitigation, recovery verification, and postmortem.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Production Overload Troubleshooting for Backend Systems
Run an evidence-driven backend overload response from page and user impact through mitigation, controlled recovery, and durable verification.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 11 min read
RED, USE, and Golden Signals Explained
Use RED, USE, and the four golden signals to diagnose request and resource failures with PromQL, safe labels, histograms, and exemplars.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 11 min read
SLI, SLO, Error Budgets, and Burn-Rate Alerts Explained
Turn user journeys into measurable SLIs, realistic SLOs, error budgets, and multi-window burn-rate alerts that page on sustained impact.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 12 min read
Dead Letter Queue Explained
Design dead-letter handling with bounded retries, failure metadata, alerting, approved replay, and duplicate-safe Java and Node.js recovery workflows.
System Design Jul 25, 2026 9 min read
Database Deadlocks Explained
Learn why database deadlocks happen, how PostgreSQL and MySQL detect them, and how to prevent and retry them safely in Java and Node.js.
API Design Jul 18, 2026 10 min read
API Rate Limit Headers Explained
Learn how API rate limit headers communicate quotas, remaining capacity, retry timing, and client behavior across current and legacy formats.