This post poked a bear of a memory that nearly ate me alive long ago.

I had an exponential socket growth issue in the late 1990s being the architect and maintainer of a little known ecommerce company that was powering a good portion of the domestic U.S. This volume problem I had equated to drinking from a fire hose that cannot be turned off yet the hose had to somehow be upgraded in motion to handle even more volume. I was young then and greatly inexperienced to truly comprehend the task I had to solve for and as the volume grew ever so slightly daily so too did the response times grow by milliseconds on transactions that few could see but all internally could understand what it meant over time. We managed to acquire the latest multi SMP hardware from Compaq but even this did not solve for the challenges of the increasing volume. I did solve the issue and it involved my third complete rewrite of the entire software stack into what is now recognized as microservices and durable message queueing. Those past choices, to this day, continue to stand the test of time.