dp.cx blog

On Monday our QA manager reported a performance regression in an upcoming release. A feature flag that was supposed to improve query performance was actually making things worse. The feature controlled automatic date filtering - ensuring that queries always included a 90-day window at most, which meant the database could use its date-based partitions instead of scanning entire tables.

Recently, I switched the software that generates this blog from a custom Perl script that I built to a Jekyll based system. The migration itself went fairly well.

Parallel::Iterator is a Perl module that can make your scripts much faster if you perform long-running tasks within a loop. It does this by managing a forking system in the background, allowing your long-running tasks to execute in parallel, instead of one at a time.