Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own. Most of my content in the podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering Buy me a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr 🧑🏫 Courses I Te ...
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Why the Windows kernel can connect slower than Linux
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.comWhy Windows Kernel connects slower than Linux I explore the behavior of TCP/IP stack in Windows kernel when it receives a RST from the backend server especially when the host is available but the port we are trying to connect to is not. This behavior is exacerbated by having both …
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Running out of TCP ephemeral source ports
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In this episode of the backend engineering show I describe an interesting bug I ran into where the web server ran out of ephemeral ports causing the system to halt. 0:00 Intro 0:30 System architecture 2:20 The behavior of the bug 4:00 Backend Troubleshooting 7:00 The cause 15:30 Ephemeral ports on loopback…
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.comLinux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.In this video I explore this with a focus on what zerocopy. 0:00 Intro0:30 IO_uring gets faster 2:00 What is io_uring7:00 How Normal…
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They made Python faster with this compiler option
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Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winLooks like fedora is compiling cpython with the -o3 flag, which does aggressive function inlining among other optimizations.This seems to improve python benchmarks performance by at most 1.16x at a cost of an extra 3MB in binary size (text segment). Although it does seem to slow down some…
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How Apache Kafka got faster by switching ext4 to XFS
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https://oscourse.win Allegro improved their Kafka produce tail latency by over 80% when they switched from ext4 to xfs. What I enjoyed most about this article is the detailed analysis and tweaking the team made to ext4 before considering switching to xfs. This is a classic case of how a good tech blog looks like in my opinion. 0:00 Intro 0:30 Summa…
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Google Patches Linux kernel with 40% TCP performance
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Get my backend course https://backend.win Google submitted a patch to Linux Kernel 6.8 to improve TCP performance by 40%, this is done via rearranging the tcp structures for better cpu cache lines, I explore this here.0:00 Intro0:30 Google improves Linux Kernel TCP by 40%1:40 How CPU Cache Line Works6:45 Reviewing the Google Patchhttps://www.phoron…
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0:00 Intro 2:00 File System Block vs Database Pages 4:00 Torn pages or partial page 7:40 How Oracle Solves torn pages 8:40 MySQL InnoDB Doublewrite buffer 10:45 Postgres Full page writes
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Cloudflare Open sources Pingora (NGINX replacement)
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Get my backend course https://backend.win Cloudflare has announced they are opening sources Pingora as a networking framework! Big news, let us discuss 0:00 Intro 0:30 Reasons why Cloudflare built Pingora? 3:00 It is a framework! 7:30 What in Pingora? 11:50 Security in Pingora 13:45 Multi-threading in Pingora 21:00 Customization vs Configuration 25…
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https://backend.win https://databases.win I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Everything goes to pages of fixed…
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In this video I explore the type of languages, compiled, garbage collected, interpreted, JIT and more.
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The Danger of Defaults - A PostgreSQL Story
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I talk about default values and how PostgreSQL 14 got slower when a default parameter has changed. Mike's bloghttps://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2024/02/it-wasnt-performance-regression-in.html
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Background writing is a process that writes dirty pages in shared buffer to the disk (well goes to the OS file cache then get flushed to disk by the OS) I go into this process in this video
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Fragmentation is a very interesting topic to me, especially when it comes to memory. While virtually memory does solve external fragmentation (you can still allocate logically contiguous memory in non-contiguous physical memory) it does however introduce performance delays as we jump all over the physical memory to read what appears to us for examp…
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In this video I explore the hidden costs of sending a request from the frontend to the backend Heard https://medium.com/@hnasr/the-journey-of-a-request-to-the-backend-c3de704de223
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.com Why create Index blocks writesIn this video I explore how create index, why does it block writes and how create index concurrently work and allow writes.0:00 Intro1:28 How Create Index works4:45 Create Index blocking Writes5:00 …
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HTTP/3 is getting popular in the cloud scene but before you migrate to HTTP/3 consider its cost. I explore it here.0:00 Intro HTTP/3 is getting popular3:40 HTTP/1.1 Cost5:18 HTTP/2 Cost6:30 HTTP/3 Costhttps://blog.apnic.net/2023/09/25/why-http-3-is-eating-the-world/
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Encrypted Client Hello - The Pros & Cons
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The Encrypted Client Hello or ECH is a new RFC that encrypts the TLS client hello to hide sensitive information like the SNI. In this video I go through pros and cons of this new rfc.0:00 Intro2:00 SNI4:00 Client Hello8:40 Encrypted Client Hello11:30 Inner Client Hello Encryption18:00 Client-Facing Outer SNI21:20 Decrypting Inner Client Hello23:30 …
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The Journey of a Request to the Backend
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From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process When we send a request to a backend most of us focus on the processing aspect of the request which is really just the last step. There is so much more happening before a request is ready to be processed, most of this step happens in the Kernel. I break this into 6 steps, each step can theo…
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They Enabled Postgres Partitioning and their Backend fell apart
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In a wonderful blog, Kyle explores the pains he faced managing a Postgres instance for a startup he works for and how enabling partitioning sigintfically created wait events causing the backend and subsequently NGINX to through 500 errors.We discuss this in this video/podcasthttps://www.kylehailey.com/post/postgres-partition-pains-lockmanager-waits…
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WebTransport - A Backend Game Changer
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WebTransport is a cutting-edge protocol framework designed to support multiplexed and secure transport over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. It brings together the best of web and transport technologies, providing an all-in-one solution for real-time, bidirectional communication on the web. Watch full episode (subscribers only) https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link…
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Your SSD lies but that's ok | Postgres fsync
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fsync is a linux system call that flushes all pages and metadata for a given file to the disk. It is indeed an expensive operation but required for durability especially for database systems. Regular writes that make it to the disk controller are often placed in the SSD local cache to accumulate more writes before getting flushed to the NAND cells.…
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The problem with software engineering
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ego is the main problem to a defective software product. the ego of the engineer or the tech lead seeps into the quality of the product. Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://backend.husseinnasser.com
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2x Faster Reads and Writes with this MongoDB feature | Clustered Collections
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.com In version 5.3, MongoDB introduced a feature called clustered collection which stores documents in the _id index as oppose to the hidden wiredTiger hidden index. This eliminates an entire b+tree seek for reads using the _id inde…
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Prime Video Swaps Microservices for Monolith: 90% Cost Reduction
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Prime video engineering team has posted a blog detailing how they moved their live stream monitoring service from microservices to a monolith reducing their cost by 90%, let us discuss this0:00 Intro2:00 Overview10:35 Distributed System Overhead21:30 From Microservices to Monolith 29:00 Scaling the Monolith32:30 Takeawayshttps://www.primevideotech.…
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://database.husseinnasser.comIn a row-store database engine, rows are stored in units called pages. Each page has a fixed header and contains multiple rows, with each row having a record header followed by its respective columns. When the database fetches a …
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AWS Serverless Lambda Supports Response Streaming
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Lambda now supports Response payload streaming, now you can flush changes to the network socket as soon as it is available and it will be written to the client socket. I think this is a game changing feature 0:00 Intro 1:00 Traditional Lambda 3:00 Server Sent Events & Chunk-Encoding 5:00 What happens to clients? 6:00 Supported Regions 7:00 My thoug…
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The Cloudflare mTLS vulnerability - A Deep Dive Analysis
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Cloudflare released a blog detailing a vulnerability that has been in their system for nearly two years. it is related to mTLS or mutual TLS and specifically client certificate revocation. I explore this in details 0:00 Intro3:00 The Vulnerability7:00 What happened?8:50 Certificate Revocation12:30 Rejecting certain endpoints 17:00 Certificate Authe…
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The Virgin Media ISP outage - What happened?
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BGP (Border gateway protocol) withdrawals caused the Virgin media ISP customers to lose their Internet connection. I go into details on this video. 0:00 Intro2:00 What happened?4:11 How BGP works?11:50 Version media withdrawals15:00 Deep dive Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https…
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GitHub SSH key is Leaked - How bad is this?
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GitHub Accidentally Exposed their SSH RSA Private key, this is the message you will get . @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!Someone could be eavesdropping on you…
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Cookie Hijacking - How Linus Tech Tips got Hacked
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How Linus Tech Tips channel got Hacked In this short video we explain how was it possible for Linux to get hacked with cookies hijacking. 0:00 Intro0:47 TLDR what happened 5:10 Cookies in Chrome7:30 Cookies Hijacking8:46 Session Tokens (Access/Refresh)10:00 Remedies
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All Postgres Locks Explained | A Deep Dive
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Get my database engineering course https://database.husseinnasser.com In this video I do a deep dive in all locks obtained by postgres, I learned a lot while making this video and hope you enjoy it. 0:00 Intro 2:30 What are Locks? 5:30 Overview of Postgres Locks 9:10 Table-Level Locks 11:40 ACCESS EXCLUSIVE 17:40 ACCESS SHARE 19:00 ROW SHARE 20:15 …
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Pinterest moves to HTTP/3 on all their clients and edge CDNs this year. They witnessed interesting gains but not without good lesson learned. The main one was the mismatch of alt-svc vs DNS ttls.I cover this on the next episode of the backend engineering course.0:00 Intro2:00 Moving h2 to h3 through alt-svc5:00 Why HTTP/36:00 HTTP/1 vs HTTP/29:00 T…
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Why Loom Users got each others’ sessions on March 7th 2023
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On March 7 2023, Loom users started seeing each others data as a result of cookies getting leaked from the CDN. This loom security breach is really critical. Let us discuss 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why Cookies 2:00 How this happens 5:50 What caused it? 7:30 How Loom solved it? 8:20 Reading the RCA 10:30 Remedies…
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How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages - A deep dive
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Discord engineering goes into details of how they migrated from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, improved the performance of their reads and writes and rearchitected their backend to support the new load. It is an interesting episode lets get into it 0:00 Intro 1:50 Relational vs Distributed 7:00 The Cassandra Troubles 11:00 SnowFlake vs UUID 14:30 B+Tree 19…
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Postgres Architecture | The Backend Engineering Show
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Creating a listener on the backend application that accepts connections is simple. You listen on an address-port pair, connection attempts to that address and port will get added to an accept queue; The application accepts connections from the queue and start reading the data stream sent on the connection. However, what part of your application doe…
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How Alt-Svc switches HTTP/2 clients to use HTTP/3 | The Backend Engineering Show
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The Alt-Svc header/frame is a capability that allows the server to adverse alternative services to the connected application available in protocols, ports or domains. It is available as a response header alt-svc and also as an HTTP/2 frame. Let us discuss this capability. 0:00 Intro 1:38 what is alt-svc? 5:30 uses of h3 in alt-svc 8:00 alt-svc head…
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Your DNS queries will eventually look like this (0x20 DNS encoding)
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Correction: Google is implementing the proposal originally submitted by researchers from Georgia institute of tech. I incorrectly said in the video that google is proposing this . Google is finally implementing a proposal from 2008 by researchers from Georgia institute of technology to make DNS cache poisoning . https://astrolavos.gatech.edu/articl…
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DropBox Removed their SSDs, got 20% faster writes
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https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/increasing-magic-pocket-write-throughput-by-removing-our-ssd-cache-disks In this episode of the backend engineering show I’ll discuss how Dropbox improved their write through put by 20% by removing all their SSDs (yes I was surprised too). DropBox uses an SSD layer as a write-back cache with SMR drives as their b…
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MySQL on HTTP/3 | The Backend Engineering Show
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The communication between backend applications and database systems always fascinated me. The protocols keep evolving and we are in constant search for an efficient protocol that best fit the workload of Backend-DB communication. In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through a blog written by @PlanetScale doing an experimentation of …
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How Shopify’s engineering improved writes by 50% with ULID | The Backend Engineering Show
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Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com Shopify posted a blog on tips to for scalable payment system, one tip peeked my interest related to switching from UUID to ULID. I explore the reasoning behind this in this video. https://shopify.engineering/building-resilient-…
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MongoDB Internal Architecture | The Backend Engineering Show
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I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Everything goes to disk, the trick is to fetch what you need from disk effi…
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The User Interface/User Experience has great impact on the backend architecture and scalability. In this podcast I discuss three UI/UX that affected backend design and scalability. 0:00 Intro 1:40 UI vs UX 4:30 Google Chrome OmniBox 12:30 1 out of X Page 20:00 YouTube Notification Resources https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chromiums-impact-on-root…
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Do DHCP and DNS Servers Communicate?
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In this video I explain how DHCP work and how it updates DNS entries for new hosts joining the network. I'll also mention Zero Config 0:00 Intro 1:00 the Network configuration 6:00 Showing DHCP in Wireshark 6:30 DHCP Discover 14:40 DHCP Offer 19:00 DHCP Request 21:30 DHCP ACK 22:00 How DHCP Updates DNS 26:15 Zero Configuration (mDNS, Link-local) Re…
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Compressing Certificates in TLS | The Backend Engineering Show
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Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)https://backend.husseinnasser.comCertificates provide a way to authenticate both the server and the client and are included as part of the TLS handshake. However, the certificates can be large because the full certificate chain is included in the h…
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Two new vulnerabilities in openssl were discovered, we discuss them in this video https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20221101.txt
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TCP Protective Load Balancing coming to Linux Kernel 6.2
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Google recent paper on protective load balancing in TCP attempts to improve packet drops and latency by making the host change the flow path using the IPv6 Flow label. The Linux kernels gets the PLB support in Linux 6.2 this December, let us discuss with this is.
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When NodeJS I/O Blocks | The Backend Engineering Show
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In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through an article I wrote discussing NodeJS Asynchronous I/O https://medium.com/@hnasr/when-nodejs-i-o-blocks-327f8a36fbd4 Learn the fundamentals of network engineering, get my udemy course https://network.husseinnasser.com Buy me a coffee if you liked this https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr 0:0…
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NGINX Internal Architecture - Workers | The Backend Engineering Show
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Buy me a coffee if you liked this https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr In this podcast I explain the NGINX internal process architecture, how NGINX spins up multiple processes per core, how each process is pinned to a CPU core for minimum context switching, how NGINX accepts connections , parses requests and talks to the backend. Get my introduction …
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Cloudflare is moving away from NGINX | The Backend Engineering Show
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Cloudflare identified several limitations in NGINX architecture and decided to write their own reverse proxy.0:00 Intro1:53 What NGINX is used for3:37 NGINX Architecture7:52 NGINX Limitations17:12 Cloudflare PingoraBuy me a coffee if you liked thishttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasrFundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link…
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Threads and Connections | The Backend Engineering Show
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In this episode of the backend engineering show I discuss the evolution of multi-threading apps, their pros and cons and then I go through 5 threading model and how they interleave with backend connection management between the threads and requests handlings. EnjoyTo learn more about networking fundamentals check out my udemy course Fundamentals of…
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