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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
I recently made some major tradeoffs in the design of Bluesky’s Following Feed/Timeline to improve the performance of writes at the cost of consistency in a way that doesn’t negatively affect users but reduced P99s by over 96%. When a user loads their Timeline, we fetch a page of post references and then hydrate the posts/actors concurrently to quickly build an API response and let them see the latest content from people they follow. Generally, this can be dealt with via policy and moderation to prevent abusive users from causing outsized load on systems, but these processes take time and can be imperfect.
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