Changelog & Friends Kaizen! Let it crash
Jan 17, 2026
Gerhard Lazu, a Kaizen expert and engineer specializing in systems and infrastructure, returns to analyze out-of-memory errors and discuss the innovative Pipedream instance status checker. He dives into the intriguing 'let it crash' philosophy, explaining how it ties to Erlang's design principles. Gerhard also examines abnormal download trends, notably a single episode being repeatedly accessed from Asia, and proposes solutions for managing those traffic spikes. His insights on Varnish behavior and LLM analysis reveal valuable strategies for performance optimization.
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Design For Controlled Failures
- Embrace controlled failures: design safe boundaries so small crashes teach you without taking down the system.
- Separate error-handling from core logic and let the runtime or supervisor restart faulty parts.
Pick Error Philosophy To Fit Your System
- Go-style error handling and Erlang's 'let it crash' are both valid for different needs.
- Choose the philosophy that matches your application's failure domain and recovery model.
Varnish Thread OOMs Didn’t Kill The VM
- Varnish threads that OOM'd were killed without rebooting the Firecracker VM, then quickly restarted.
- The cache warmed back within seconds, preserving overall service despite child process failures.
