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Published by Hussein Nasser
Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own. Most of my content in the podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering Buy me a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr 🧑🏫 Courses I Teach https://husseinnasser.com/courses
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I like SQL but the standard should have included ways to hint instead of the abstraction of "let me do it for you"
In this episode I explore why you should take some time to examine the operation you are caching before doing so. And why caching is a cop-out
How open ai agents "hacked" hugging face
The infinite scroll in social media as we know it today is despised by all. But it always start as a bad idea. It originated as a result of UI change to relief the backend database from inefficient queries. I explore this in this episode of the backend engineering. 0:00 Intro1:00 Classic Paged results 6:23 Limitations of paging9:00 The scroll interface 12:00 How TikTok to infinite scroll 14:00 The current state
An aws engineer discovered a 50% regression in postgres throughput while testing the new Linux 7.0 kernel. The cause turns out to be massive TLB and page faults exacerbated by Postgres process-based design. In this backend engineering show episode I dive deep into how this was discovered, the root cause and the possible fixes and workarounds. Intermediate and Advanced Backend Engineering Course Bundlehttps://courses.husseinnasser.com/bundleMy Book, Root Cause: Stories and Lessons from Two Decades of Backend Engineering Bugs https://amzn.to/4cKfZhe 0:00 Intro2:30 The Discovery6:30 Spinlocks9:25 Preemption 13:00 Root Cause17:00 How Postgres Processes exacerbated the problem 22:30 Is the fix easy?25:50 Summary
A discussion about why many engineers still love the struggle, the mistakes, and the process of figuring things out themselves. This is how we grow and get better and stronger. Letting AI do everything (even though it can’t) robs us this feeling..
I wrote a new book that has been in the works for years. It is called Root Cause , and it is for those who enjoy the art of backend engineering. Early in my career, 20 years ago, I built backend and database applications without fully grasping their inner mechanics. Performance issues, race conditions, bugs, and even data corruption often left me lost. Since that day, I resolved to truly understand how systems work. From networking protocols and intermediary proxies to backend services and various database engines. I made it a habit to follow every request on its journey through the dark alleys of the network, down to the bowels of the database engine, meanwhile interacting with various kernel data structures in the process at every hop, and back. I became obsessed with understanding what happens behind the scenes in software. Not just what breaks, and how but also why and what was the source of the bleed. Root Cause is a collection of the most interesting bugs I encountered, ranging from performance bottlenecks and non-deterministic crashes to subtle data inconsistencies and incorrect results. This book is for anyone curious about how production backend systems really behave under pressure, and how to debug them when they don’t. Even when you don’t have access to the source code. Root cause consists of 15 chapters, each is a story about a backend bug, with investigation, diagrams, a section of a fundamental concept until the root cause is revealed. Grab your copy here paperback or kindle ebook paperback https://amzn.to/4cKfZhe ebook https://amzn.to/4cfQjJj
In this video I introduce 5 different design patterns for building backend applications. Each mode explains how a socket listener is established, a connections are established and how threads and connections are managed to read, write and process requests.
Page tables provide the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory for each process. This means it needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. I explore the inner workings of page tables in this episode. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Virtual Memory ⁃ ⁃ 8:00 MMU 10:00 Page Tables ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 11:30 Single Table Byte Addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 16:00 Single Table Page addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 19:00 Multi-level Paging (Radix tree) ⁃ ⁃ 31:00 Huge Tables ⁃ ⁃ 33:00 TLB ⁃ ⁃ Summary
Page faults occurs when the process tries to access a memory that isn’t backed by a physical page kernel raises a fault which loads a page. It happens on first access, stack expansion, COW, swap and much more. However it comes with a cost. In this episode of the backend engineering show I dissect the need and the cost page faults in the kernel. 0:00 Intro 4:00 Virtual memory Abstraction of physical memory Memory sharing Allow more processes to run , unused go to disk Numa, kernel can place memory near the cpu 12:00 VMA areas Text/code Data BSS Heap Stack 19:50 Kernel mode 25:30 What is a Page fault? 30:30 First access page fault 33:00 Stack Expansion page fault 34:30 CoW page fault 38:00 Swap page fault 39:39 File backed page fault 40:29 Permission page fault 45:30 Summary
On October 19 2025 AWS experienced an outage that lasted over a day, 10 days later we finally got the root cause analysis and we know exactly what caused the DNS to fail0:00 Summary 5:30 How did Dynamo lost its DNS?13:41 EC2 Errors 16:16 Network Load Balancer ErrorsRCA here https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
There are cases where the backend may need to close the connection to prevent unexpected situations, prevent bad actors or simply just free up resources. Closing a connection gracefully allows clients and backends to clean up and finish any pending requests. In this episode of the backend engineering show I discuss graceful connections in both HTTP/1.1 via the connection header and HTTP/2 via the GOAWAY frame. 0:00 Intro 4:58 Why shutdown connection? 6:46 HTTP/1.1 Graceful shutdown 12:26 Cost of HTTP/2 17:40 HTTP/2 GoAWAY frame 23:40 Summary Links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVKPrDrEwTI&t=1s https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/net/%2B/master/socket/client_socket_pool_manager.cc#76 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40555364 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40501721
Postgres 18 has been released with many exciting features such as UUIDv7, Over explain module, composite index skip scans, and the most anticipated asynchronous IO with worker and io_uring mode which I uncover in this show. Hope you enjoy it 0:00 Intro 1:30 Synchronous vs Asynchronous calls 3:00 Synchronous IO 6:30 Asynchronous IO 10:00 Postgres 17 synchronous io 17:20 The challenge of Async IO in Postgres 18 20:00 io_method worker23:00 io_method io_uring 29:30 io_method sync 31:08 Async IO isn’t done! 3 1:30 Support for backend writers 32:36 Improve worker io_method 33:00 direct io support 37:00 Summary
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winktls is brilliant.TLS encryption/decryption often happens in userland. While TCP lives in the kernel. With ktls, userland can hand the keys to the kernel and the kernel does crypto. When calling write, the kernel encrypts the packet and send it to the NIC.When calling read, the kernel decrypts the packet and handed it to the userspace. This mode still taxes the host’s CPU of course, so there is another mode where the kernel offloads the crypto to the NIC device! Host CPU becomes free. Incoming packets to the NIC are decrypted in device before they are DMAed to the kernel. outgoing packets are encrypted before they leave the NIC to the network.ktls still need handshake to happen in userspace. There is also enabling zerocopy in some cases (now that kernel has context) Deserves a video. So much good stuff.0:00 Intro2:00 Userspace SSL Libraries 3:00 ktls 6:00 Kernel Encrypts/Decrypts (TLS_SW)8:20 NIC offload mode (TLS_HW)10:15 NIC does it all (TLS_HW_RECORD)12:00 Write TX Example13:50 Read RX Example17:00 Zero copy (sendfile)https://docs.kernel.org/networking/tls-offload.html
If you are bored of contemporary topics of AI and need a breather, I invite you to join me to explore a mundane, fundamental and earthy topic. The CPU. A reading of my substack article https://hnasr.substack.com/p/the-beauty-of-the-cpu
This new PostgreSQL 17 feature is game changer. They know can combine IOs when performing sequential scan. Grab my database course https://courses.husseinnasser.com
No technical video today, just talking about the idea of discipline and consistency.
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course This video is an overview of how the operating system kernel does socket management and the different data structures it utilizes to achieve that. timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:38 Socket vs Connections 7:50 SYN and Accept Queue 18:56 Socket Sharding 23:14 Receive and Send buffers 27:00 Summary
Polling is the ability to interrogate a backend to see if a piece of information is ready. It can introduce a chatty system and as a result long polling was born. In this video I explain the beauty of this design pattern and how we can push it to its limit. 0:00 Intro 0:45 Polling 2:30 Problem with Polling 3:50 Long Polling 8:18 Timeouts 10:00 Long Polling Benefits 12:00 Make requests into Long Polling 17:36 Request Resumption 21:40 Summary
You get better as a software engineer when you go through these stages. 0:00 Intro 1:15 Understand a technology 7:07 Articulate how it works 15:30 Understand its’ limitations 19:48 Try to build something better 27:45 Realize what you built also has limitations 32:48 Appreciate the original tech as is Understand a technology We use technologies all the time without knowing how it works. And it is ok not knowing how things work if interests isn’t there. But when there is interest to understand how something works, pursue it. It feels good when you understand how something works because you work better with it, you swim with the tide instead of against it. When I learned how TCP/IP work.. you would appreciate every connection request, how you read requests. You will ask questions, what is my code doing here? When exactly I’m creating connections? When am I reading from the connection? Is it safe to share connections? Articulate how it works This one is not easy, you might think you understand something until you try to explain how it works. If you find yourself using jargon you probably don’t understand and you just try to impress others. Have you seen people who want to talk about something to show they understand it? It’s the opposite. Try to truly articlate how it works, you will really understand it , back to 1. I thought I understand how backend reads requests until I tried to speak to it. Understand the technology limitations Once 1,2 are done you will truly understand the tech, now you are confidant, you are excited about the tech and you will truly see when you can use the tech to its full potential and also know the weak points of the tech where it breaks, this happens a lot with TCP/IP. We know tcps limitations. Try to build something better This one is optional and can be skipped, but attempting to design or building something better then the tech because you know the limitations will truly reveal how you became better. But the challenge here is the ego, you might understand the limitations but you problem is thinking that what you will build is flawless. This step must be proceed with caution. Realize what you build also has limitation Dust settles.. this step hurts, and you may take a while to realize it, but whatever you build will have flaws… and when you realize this it is when you get better as an engineer. Appreciate the tech as is This is when you are back full circle you are back to the first stage, look at the technology and understand it but don’t judge it.. just know the limitations and its strength and flow with it. Stop fighting and instead build around a tech, does that mean you shouldn’t build anything new, of course not. Go build, but don’t stress around making something better to defeat existing tech. But actually build it for building it.
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Observed September 13, 2026. Cached outside the daily freshness window; the positions keep the date they were taken on.
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