The author discusses a production incident at Netflix caused by a concurrency bug that was consuming CPUs, impacting server capacity. Despite limitations on fixing the bug until Monday, the team creatively implemented a solution by manually terminating instances, ensuring a relaxing weekend. The author emphasizes the practicality and unconventional problem-solving approach at Netflix, highlighting the importance of prioritizing engineers’ sanity. The incident serves as a lesson in troubleshooting non-thread-safe code and the value of prioritizing unconventional techniques to achieve goals effectively. Ultimately, the focus was on optimizing quality of life in addition to technical performance.
https://pushtoprod.substack.com/p/netflix-terrifying-concurrency-bug