Benchmarks, post-mortems, and deep technical essays from the Merctechs engineering collective. We publish methodology and raw numbers — not conclusions you have to take on faith.
How we cut cold-start latency from 340ms to 94ms by rethinking isolate warm-up, V8 snapshot reuse, and the allocator behavior nobody talks about.
A field report on 4-bit quantization, knowledge distillation, and the thermal budget that quietly governs every on-device inference decision.
We ran the same collaborative-editing workload through both a Raft cluster and a CRDT layer. The trade-offs were not where we expected them.
When a downstream consumer stalls, naive buffering turns a hiccup into an outage. Here's the credit-based scheme we landed on instead.
Product quantization buys you 8× smaller indexes — at a recall cost. We mapped exactly where that curve bends for sub-millisecond retrieval.
We let untrusted third-party code run in production behind a WebAssembly boundary. Here's the host-call overhead, the memory model, and the footguns.
A dual-write and backfill harness that lets us evolve Postgres schemas under live traffic — with a rollback path we actually trust.
Tail latency that looked like network jitter turned out to be allocator fragmentation. How we found it, and the arena strategy that fixed it.
Head-based sampling drops the traces you actually need. We moved to tail-based sampling and measured what it costs to keep the interesting 0.1%.
The papers promise 2–3× throughput. We benchmarked draft-model speculation across batch sizes on commodity GPUs to find where the promise holds.
Live experiments, focus domains, and the collective behind the notes.