Independent engineering labs on distributed systems, production AI, and reliability.https://corerouters.com/https://corerouters.com/labs/backend-latency-diagnosis/https://corerouters.com/labs/backend-latency-diagnosis/A failure-oriented walkthrough of connection-pool saturation, database contention, queueing, and the misleading comfort of normal host-level CPU.Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://corerouters.com/labs/kafka-partitions/https://corerouters.com/labs/kafka-partitions/Partition count is a scaling mechanism, not a universal cure. This lab separates broker capacity, key skew, consumer concurrency, and rebalance overhead.Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://corerouters.com/labs/rag-production-readiness/https://corerouters.com/labs/rag-production-readiness/A compact failure matrix for stale documents, retrieval misses, chunking errors, ranking drift, latency, and missing observability.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT