Tag
durability
- Sep 29, 2026 Failure Domains and the Arithmetic Behind Replication Factor How a copy count becomes a durability estimate, why that estimate collapses when failures correlate, and what placement must do to keep the arithmetic honest. filesystems
- Sep 23, 2026 Unstable Writes, COMMIT, and the Verifier A write may be acknowledged before the server has put the data on stable storage. The reply says how stable it is, and the client decides whether to ask for a commit — a decision that trades latency against the risk of losing an acknowledged write. filesystems
- Jul 7, 2026 What fsync Guarantees and What It Costs on Real Devices The ordering and durability contracts of fsync, fdatasync, and sync_file_range, how a device cache flush turns them into round trips, and where the guarantee quietly ends. performance engineering
- Jun 17, 2026 Transaction Lifetime and Durability in IndexedDB Why an IndexedDB transaction commits without being asked, which callbacks keep it alive, how a failed request aborts the whole scope, and what the durability hint actually guarantees. web platform
- Jun 15, 2026 Write-Ahead Log Record Ordering and the Force-at-Commit Boundary Why a log record must reach stable storage before the page it describes, what LSN comparison guarantees during recovery, and where group commit fits in the sequence. databases
- May 25, 2026 Checksum Blind Spots: Misdirected Writes and Lost Updates The fault classes that survive a correct checksum, from acknowledged writes that never landed to corruption introduced above the filesystem, and the ordering machinery each one needs. filesystems
- Mar 23, 2026 Near-Real-Time Refresh and the Commit Boundary How an index makes newly added documents searchable within seconds, and the distinction between committing to the filesystem cache and committing to durable storage. information retrieval
- Jan 14, 2026 A Completed Write Is Not Yet Durable: Persistence Domains and Ordering Why write and close return long before bytes reach media, how a persistence domain decides what a crash can lose, and why durability, ordering, and atomicity need separate mechanisms. memory systems
- Jan 8, 2026 What fsync Actually Waits For, and Why the Directory Counts The difference between fsync, fdatasync, and syncfs, why a durable file can still vanish after a crash, and what rename-based update protocols must flush to be correct. memory systems
- Dec 5, 2025 The Degraded Window: Rebuild Rate, Exposure, and the Second Failure How the time between a device loss and the completion of its rebuild becomes a durability multiplier, and why the repair rate cannot be set independently of it. filesystems
- Nov 29, 2025 Replication Lag as the Real Recovery Point Bound Why asynchronous cross-region replication sets an RPO that varies with write rate and network conditions, and how to measure the lag that actually matters for data loss. cloud infrastructure
- Nov 21, 2025 Cross-Region Replication and the Window Between Two Copies Replication is asynchronous by default, so the second region lags the first. What the lag does to failover, to deletes, and to any read that crosses the boundary. cloud infrastructure
- Nov 14, 2025 Durability Barriers, Flushes, and What fsync Actually Waits For The storage-stack path a flush traverses, why a drive cache that ignores it voids every journal guarantee, and what a directory fsync must order. filesystems
- Nov 7, 2025 The Durable Outbox: Committing Locally Before the Network Agrees How an app records an intended write on disk, drains it in order, and survives process death, so that a user action is never lost to a failed request. mobile computing
- Oct 9, 2025 Where the Commit Returns: Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication Boundaries What a commit acknowledgement actually guarantees at each replication mode, how quorum commits move the durability boundary, and why a synchronous replica becomes a latency dependency. databases
- Oct 2, 2025 The Flat Keyspace: What an Object Store Does and Does Not Provide Object storage maps opaque keys to immutable byte strings. The operations it omits, including rename, append, and multi-key atomicity, shape every design built on top of it. cloud infrastructure
- Sep 26, 2025 Fsync Cost and Journal Modes on Flash Storage What a flush request actually guarantees on a phone, how SQLite synchronous levels trade durability for write latency, and why the barrier between the journal and the database file is the one that matters. mobile computing
- Jul 16, 2025 fsync, fdatasync, and What Survives a Power Loss The durability calls promise different things about data and metadata, and a file entry needs a second call on its directory; where the guarantees stop on each filesystem. filesystems
- May 27, 2025 Copysets and the Tail of Random Placement Why uniformly random replica placement produces objects whose copies share a failure set, how many nodes one rack loss can take with it, and what bounded placement changes. filesystems
- Apr 21, 2025 WAL Frames, Read Marks, and What a Checkpoint Can Move How the write-ahead log appends frames instead of rewriting pages in place, how readers pin the log through read marks, and why a checkpoint is bounded by the slowest open reader. mobile computing
- Mar 31, 2025 What a Successful Write Guarantees: Durability and Read-After-Write Consistency A 200 response means the bytes survive disk failure, not that every reader sees them yet. How replication, quorums, and listing indexes set the visibility rules. cloud infrastructure
- Dec 15, 2024 Write-Ahead Logging and Crash Recovery in Search How a search index survives a crash without losing recently added documents, by logging mutations to a sequential write-ahead log and replaying it after restart. information retrieval
- Jul 12, 2024 Cache Flush, FUA, and What a Write Completion Means How a device with a volatile write cache reorders writes, what a flush and a force-unit-access write each promise, and why the barrier is only as good as the drive. filesystems
- Mar 14, 2024 Write Amplification Across the Storage Stack How one logical row change becomes many device writes, how to attribute the multiplier to each layer, and which layer dominates for B-trees and LSM trees. databases
- Sep 27, 2023 Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication: Where the Commit Point Sits How the moment a write is acknowledged determines durability, latency, and the amount of data a failover can lose, and why semi-synchronous replication is the usual compromise. distributed systems
- Jun 9, 2023 fsync, fdatasync, and Where the Durability Boundary Actually Sits What the kernel guarantees when a write returns, which metadata fdatasync skips, why direct I/O does not remove the need for a flush, and how double buffering wastes memory. databases