That one time I used Go panics for flow control
The article discusses a situation where a key service in a support infrastructure became overloaded due to high query demand. The author explains how they implemented a workaround using Go's panic mechanism for flow control to handle cancellation of long-running sort operations. This approach, while not typical, allowed them to avoid unnecessary processing when queries were abandoned.
- ▪A support service was overloaded due to high query demand and retries from upstream services.
- ▪The sorting phase of queries was consuming most of the CPU time, and traditional context cancellation was not applicable.
- ▪The author used Go's panic mechanism to implement a non-local control flow for handling query cancellations.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How our protagonist discovered that a key service that powers our support was absurdly vulnerable to overload, and what we did to fix it. Part of our support infrastructure at work is an in-memory datastore, that allows us to query our outstanding support work over various dimensions, such as work type, whether it's been put on hold for some reason, etc. It's functionally equivalent to a single table in an SQL database, where you have a single dataset, boolean filters and configurable sorting. At work, we have an in-memory datastore that powers part of our support infrastructure. Its kind of analgous to having bitmap filters with post-hoc filtering, so any use of sort/limit will sort the entire result set.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Noncrab.
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