Go

What if the real gain wasn’t at the byte level?

I have always been fascinated by compression algorithms — I was 15 when I “invented” Run Length Encoding (before learning it had been discovered more than 20 years before I was born).
I marveled at the visual simplicity of Huffman coding, at the cleverness of Lempel-Ziv which dynamically builds its dictionary.

These algorithms are powerful, and it is no coincidence that they are continuously improved and combined to produce ever more powerful new algorithms: Brotli, zstd.

Sometimes an investigation tells a different story than the one you expected.

That’s what happened to me recently while investigating why a pod was ending up OOMKilled two to three times a day.

A quick look at the memory of the incriminated pod doesn’t show the typical rising curve of a memory leak. I’m missing data just before the OOM (because it’s always when your metrics system is migrating that this kind of incident happens), but with the day’s data, the cause seems to lie elsewhere.