The database is one of the most critical components here at Rollbar and its performance ripples across most of our SLOs. One of our goals last months has been to remove unnecessary or repetitive load from it as much as possible. Caching queries is the 101 solution whenever you need to keep scaling up while maintaining, or even reducing, database costs (very relevant these days). Here’s an example of how just one query has been drastically reduced thanks to caching.

We are very lucky on the Rollbar Customer Engineering Team because we get to work with many many development teams. Each team develops, tests, and deploys their applications in their own way. They have chosen different languages and frameworks to solve their particular problem. We learn from each team that we work with, and share these learnings to our Product Design team.

One of the hardest tasks for software engineers is often having to stop what you are doing and look into a software bug (error), find the root cause and fix it quickly. This is hard because you may have never seen the affected code (someone else wrote it), it could be code you wrote a long time ago or just the context switching from what you are working on right now.