Performance Engineering

Memory optimization in Go applications is a critical skill that separates good developers from great ones. While Go’s garbage collector handles memory management automatically, understanding how to profile, analyze, and optimize memory usage can dramatically improve your application’s performance, reduce infrastructure costs, and enhance user experience. In production environments where every millisecond and megabyte counts, these skills become invaluable. Go provides exceptional built-in tooling for memory profiling through the pprof package and runtime statistics.

Introduction In distributed systems, cascading failures are one of the most devastating failure modes. When a downstream service becomes slow or unresponsive, upstream services can exhaust their resources waiting for responses, causing a domino effect that brings down entire systems. The 2017 AWS S3 outage, which cascaded across multiple services and lasted nearly four hours, demonstrated how a single service failure can ripple through interconnected systems. Circuit breakers act as automatic safety switches that prevent cascading failures by detecting when a service is unhealthy and temporarily blocking requests to it.