Hacker News Reader

What does the business need?

What can the service deliver?

If you need it faster than it can deliver... then setting your timeouts/paging/whatever to that point will just bring you pain and suffering.

I think you'll find a lot of people just say "what's p99 right now", add a little to it so "it won't page me", and leave it there.

Actually driving down p99... is not nearly common enough.

View on HN

Thank you for replying!

I completely agree that people in most companies do not push down P99 enough.

I think this is a direct response to the second question, and assumes that people are setting timeouts statically. Is my understanding correct?

It's been my experience that people usually build systems that expect a certain timeout for a certain service or perhaps service+method.

That said, not all clients are created equal. The ads folks who used to hit my system way back when had far tighter deadline requirements than the calendar or spreadsheet people, for instance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com