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Reducing latency with esoteric Linux process flags
How an elusive Linux kernel API flag nearly cost us a 6x latency improvement.
This is the story of how a seemingly simple task turned into a deep dive into the undocumented intricacies of the Linux kernel, Bubblewrap sandboxing, and Rust Tokio’s threading model. Unlike full virtual machines or containerization like Docker, which can be resource-intensive, Bubblewrap operates with minimal overhead while still providing strong isolation, which is crucial in our bot environments where compute is limited. This subtle interaction between Tokio’s thread management, Bubblewrap’s process isolation, and Linux kernel internals was completely undocumented in any of the sources we initially checked, making it a particularly nasty debugging challenge.
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