Core
Latency Optimization
Measure p50, p95, and p99 before you touch anything, then find where the time actually goes: tokenization, retrieval, inference, or post-processing. A naive RAG pipeline that takes 1.5 seconds can usually reach sub-100ms perceived latency by caching, parallelizing retrieval, picking a smaller model, and streaming the first token, in that order of payoff.
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System Design & Production EngineeringA customer's Next.js site has a 3-second TTFB. Diagnose it and walk me through fixes, and how you'd prove each one worked. →medium · FreeRAG & Agent System DesignA multi-hop agent feels sluggish at p95. Design its latency budget and cut tail latency without swapping models. →hard · PremiumSystem Design & Production EngineeringYou add a cache in front of an LLM endpoint at a customer. Walk through invalidation, the stampede, and what's safe to cache. →hard · PremiumSystem Design & Production EngineeringDesign a real-time collaborative coding assistant: stream completions under 200ms for 10k concurrent users →hard · PremiumRAG & Agent System DesignOne tenant started sending 100,000-token documents and everyone else's latency doubled. The rate limiter says nobody is over quota. →hard · PremiumSystem Design & Production EngineeringWhat do p50, p95, and p99 latency actually mean, and why do production engineers obsess over the tail? →easy · Free
