Home / Companies / Neon / Blog / Post Details
Content Deep Dive

How posix_spawn & close_range “fixed” cold starts

Blog post from Neon

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Christian Schwarz
Word Count
2,795
Company Posts That Month
38
Language
English
Hacker News Points
2
Post removed?
No
Summary

The Pageserver in Neon's system experienced a severe regression in cold start latency after making changes to improve stability. The root cause was found to be the inefficient closing of file descriptors as part of the defense-in-depth strategy against compromise of walredo processes. To fix this, the code switched from using the `close_fds` crate to manually issuing the `close_range` system call, which allowed for faster process creation and reduced latency. This highlights the importance of dynamic tracing at runtime and the need to carefully consider the trade-offs in process creation primitives.

Trends Found in this Post
Trend Post Mentions Total Month Mentions Posts Companies MoM
Observability 3 1,155 262 90 -8%
Serverless 1 785 157 75 +6%
Use This Data

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.