dotnet

We’ve all been there — an application that was running smoothly suddenly starts behaving unpredictably. CPU spikes, erratic memory usage, and sluggish performance with no obvious culprit. Recently, we faced such an issue in one of our applications, where CPU usage fluctuated wildly between 20% and 100%. Digging deeper, we uncovered unexpected memory allocations and garbage collection behavior, leading us on a journey through profiling, memory dumps, and even some ad hoc solution to track down the root cause....

Dynamic collections, such as the dynamic array (also known as a List in C#), are without a doubt one of the most common data structure, and not only in C# but in computer science in general. The dotnet base class library exposes plenty of dynamic collections to fulfil a wide number of usecases: (System.Collections.)List<T>, Dictionary<K, V>, HashSet<T>, Queue<T>, Stack<T>, and more. But they all share one thing in common: they are based on dynamic reallocation of backing arrays, which can lead to suboptimal performance and excessive memory allocation....

The GitLab CI ecosystem is full of features and integrations that make it a powerful tool for building, testing, and deploying your applications. It comes with an integrated package registry to share and manage your packages. However, the GitLab SaaS API (gitlab.com) comes with rate-limits which can be a problem for scaling CI/CD pipelines, and quite frustrating when you hit them. In this article, I will share a solution I find odd yet very effective: implementing a caching proxy in front of the NuGet GitLab package registry....

In this article I’d like to share my journey learning about caching, and my research on how to make it more efficient. This article is the first in a serie of articles about caching, and here we’ll start by discussing the challenges and memory considerations when doing in-memory caching. This was done as part of my day job as a Staff backend engineer at Equativ, a leading provider of digital advertising solutions, offering a range of products and services to help businesses reach their target audiences and achieve their marketing goals....