Field-Value Automata
www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/05/19/Quamina-Matchers
What Jamie wrote
Great essay, really for programmers, on optimizing a specific high-volume use case.
When I introduced Quamina, I described the core trick: You prepare an arbitrary JSON blob for automaton-based matching by “Flattening” it into a list of name/value pairs, then sorting them in name order. Today, a closer look at how you work with the flattened data.
Bray's overview of this solution is interesting and a good example of how programmers have to optimize. One of my favorite things about Bray's writing is that he has run software at massive scale.
Finally, we had the insane luxury of running this in production against millions-per-second event flows and watching what broke. And of hearing from other teams using it about what they had managed to break. I guarantee: Nobody is smart enough to predict the behavior of software under this kind of stress without experiencing it.
The dynamics of immense load on software systems is truly impossible to model.