Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Microservice architectures have become the de facto paradigm for building scalable, service-oriented systems. Although their decentralized design promotes resilience and rapid development, the inherent complexity leads to subtle performance challenges. In particular, non-fatal errors - internal failures of remote procedure calls that do not cause top-level request failures - can accumulate along the critical path, inflating latency and wasting resources. In this work, we analyze over 11 billion RPCs across more than 6,000 microservices at Uber. Our study shows that nearly 29% of successful requests experience non-fatal errors that remain hidden in traditional monitoring. We propose a novel latency-reduction estimator ( LR estimator ) to quantify the potential benefit of eliminating these errors. Our contributions include a systematic study of RPC error patterns, a methodology to estimate latency reductions, and case studies demonstrating up to a 30% reduction in tail latency.
Institution: Washington University in St. Louis
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Universitas Brawijaya
Award: G690233364
OpenAlex ID: W4411411515