// Insights

Field notes

Publishing

Latency budgets, failure modes and cost per minute — written up with the numbers.

// FeaturedSeptember 10, 2026

The socket reconnected. The subscription did not.

A dropped websocket comes back on its own — that is what the library is for. What does not come back is the room it was in, because rooms belong to the socket that left. The connection reads healthy and the screen is blind.

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14 posts

Real-time telemetrySeptember 10, 2026
The socket reconnected. The subscription did not.
A dropped websocket comes back on its own — that is what the library is for. What does not come back is the room it was in, because rooms belong to the socket that left. The connection reads healthy and the screen is blind.
Real-time telemetrySeptember 7, 2026
Your packet-loss number is a property of your congestion controller
"We see 4% packet loss" sounds like a fact about the network. Usually it is a fact about your own stack. We built a link configured to lose nothing, and then made it lose half a percent — by changing the sender.
Real-time telemetrySeptember 4, 2026
The deploy that logs every driver back in at once
For a request/response API a missing shutdown handler costs a handful of failed requests. For a socket system it costs a synchronised reconnect of every connected client, each one re-running an authorisation query — and none of it shows up in the metrics you already have.
Real-time telemetrySeptember 1, 2026
You are storing the track and you cannot draw it
Every accepted ping goes in. One row each, no thinning, four columns, no indexes — not even on the foreign key — in a codebase that indexes another table nine ways. And the product it was collected for draws three markers and no line.
Real-time telemetryAugust 29, 2026
Status is not freshness — the field the API sent and the dashboard threw away
Every dashboard that confidently shows a position that is no longer true has a near-miss inside it. The freshness data usually already arrived from the API. Somebody wrote a guard, and put it on the wrong axis.
Real-time telemetryAugust 26, 2026
The timestamp that was never on the wire
A phone that loses signal keeps recording. When it reconnects it sends everything at once — and if your API never gave it a field to say when each fix was taken, the server stamps them all with now. The oldest position arrives last and wins.
Real-time videoAugust 23, 2026
Live captions on a call — where the latency actually comes from
Adding captions to a call sounds like a feature request and behaves like an architecture decision. The latency does not come from the network or the model — it comes from the window the recogniser needs before it will commit to a word, and from where you attached the tap.
Real-time videoAugust 20, 2026
You cannot load-test a real-time system the way you load-test an API
Load-testing a real-time system with a request-rate tool measures the wrong thing entirely. Here is what actually breaks — the restart nobody scripts, the leak a thirty-minute run cannot see, and the memory limit that fires before the number you were trying to measure.
Real-time videoAugust 17, 2026
How many cameras fit on one box — and the ceiling that hides until you cross it
Sizing a box for a camera fleet has two answers and people only compute one. Here are measured cores per stream for the software path, the hardware ceiling that stops you at eight sessions while the GPU sits at 8% utilisation, and what crossing it looks like — which is nothing at all.
Real-time videoAugust 14, 2026
Your SFU bill is a transcode bill — the 24/7 publish nobody ordered
One multiplication tells you whether your media bill is a bandwidth problem or a transcoding problem — and it is almost always the second. Modelled at 1000 cameras against a published price list, the difference between two configurations is a six-figure monthly line, and the fix has a price nobody quotes.
Real-time videoAugust 11, 2026
Video is black on iPhones and fine everywhere else — the level your camera declares
Android plays it, desktop plays it, the iPhone shows a black rectangle and reports no errors. The cause is one number in the SPS, the tell is two counters in getStats, and the fix costs no CPU at all.
Real-time videoAugust 6, 2026
Mobile viewers stall while desktop is fine — why your SFU can't make them a lower-quality layer
Everyone assumes the media server adapts quality. It selects quality — among the encodings the publisher already produced. Here is what that changes for a fleet that publishes one stream: the four fixes that don't work, the three that do, and the second job the transcoder was doing for you until you switched it off.

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Tell us where you are — the system, the constraint, and the number that is wrong. We reply within a day with a concrete next step.

The socket reconnected. The subscription did not.

// All posts

The socket reconnected. The subscription did not.

Your packet-loss number is a property of your congestion controller

The deploy that logs every driver back in at once

You are storing the track and you cannot draw it

Status is not freshness — the field the API sent and the dashboard threw away

The timestamp that was never on the wire

Live captions on a call — where the latency actually comes from

You cannot load-test a real-time system the way you load-test an API

How many cameras fit on one box — and the ceiling that hides until you cross it

Your SFU bill is a transcode bill — the 24/7 publish nobody ordered

Video is black on iPhones and fine everywhere else — the level your camera declares

Mobile viewers stall while desktop is fine — why your SFU can't make them a lower-quality layer

// Tags

Shipping this in production?