latency-critical-systems

Topics in the source

• Latency Critical Systems
• Split The Metrics
• Map The Hot Path
• Optimization Order
• Verification
• Guardrails

Use this skill when the user cares about realtime behavior, hot paths, streaming freshness, or execution speed. This includes HFT-like infrastructure, but the skill is engineering-focused. It does not authorize live trading or financial advice. Do not collapse everything into "fast." Track: p50, p95, and p99 latency; throughput; freshness age; queue depth; cache hit rate; provider/API response time; browser render time; correctness under load; failure and retry behavior. Write the path from user/event to final visible state: Then measure each segment separately. 1. Remove unnecessary round trips. 2. Cache stable reads with freshness metadata. 3. Batch small calls and writes. 4. Move compute closer to the data or the user. 5. Split hot and cold paths. 6. Apply backpressure before queues grow unbounded. 7. Use streaming only when it improves freshness or user experience. 8. Add canaries for stale data, degraded providers, and bad cache state. Use live readbacks when a deployed surface exists: HTTP timing and response headers; provider freshness timestamp; queue or job state; edge/cache state; browser verification for actual UI freshness; logs around retries and degraded mode. For mar

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