Using Honeycomb to Investigate a Redis Connection Leak

Alex Vondrak, a Senior Platform Engineer at true[X], details his experience troubleshooting a Redis-related issue using Honeycomb, which led to the discovery of a workaround. The problem began when clients connected to a new Redis database spiked unexpectedly, leading to connection failures due to a RedisLabs-imposed connection cap. The issue stemmed from a deployed workaround that over-relied on blocking operations, specifically the BLPOP Redis command, which exacerbated connection problems. Despite various attempts like setting client timeouts and monkey-patching libraries, Vondrak struggled to identify the issue's root cause. By employing Honeycomb for live tracing, he discovered that a client-side read timeout was adding unnecessary delays, causing endless retries and idle connections. By modifying his Redis command to circumvent the read timeout logic, he successfully reduced connection counts and restored functionality. The experience highlighted the importance of using live tracing for debugging and ensuring instrumentation in problematic codebases.

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