Eliminating Distributed Lock Starvation: 100% to 0%

Context

A stateful service took bursts of concurrent writes during short, predictable peak windows.

Problem

Every write went through one global Redis lock. At peak, writers starved completely (100% starvation) and race conditions corrupted state.

Approach

Replaced the lock with an append-only event log: writers append, and current state is derived by reading the log in order. No writer waits on another, and ordering comes from the log itself.

Result

Lock starvation fell from 100% to 0%.
Write races disappeared at peak load.
The same model later supported a lock-free analytics pipeline.

More case studies

Caching

Cutting cache memory 44%

before100%

after56%

Key-level memory profiling and a shared Redis client library cut cache memory 44%, peak utilization from 94% to 56%, and ended connection drops.

Databases

60% faster partner APIs

before1.0×

after0.4×

Finding slow SQL behind partner-facing APIs with OpenTelemetry tracing, then removing expensive joins, partitioning indexes and shrinking payloads.

Platform

Infrastructure changes through pull requests

Engineers moved to read-only cloud access; every change reviewed and logged.

How I won buy-in for GitOps, moved engineers to read-only cloud access and made every infrastructure change reviewed and auditable.