u/isaacvandoin r/sre • Recommends
Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale
Excellent talk by Lorin Hochstein, an SRE at Airbnb, from SSW earlier this month. Thought some of you would enjoy it!
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#saturation#systemoverload#lorinhochstein
Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale - Lorin Hochstein | SSW 2026
Software Should Work
12K subscribers • 8 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 2 people: 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Lorin Hochstein, SRE at Airbnb
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
16K views3 months ago2 recommendations
Distributed systemsSystems programmingScaling and large-scale architectureSRE and incidentsFault tolerance and failure
Lorin Hochstein explores the problem of system saturation, explaining how software systems fail when they hit resource limits and how to prepare.
Abstract: Even in the ethereal world of software, everything has a limit. And, once that limit is reached, very bad things can happen. In this talk, we will explore the problem of saturation: when a software system runs into one of these limits. We'll see a sampling of the many different kinds of system overload, how our systems are always potentially at risk of saturation no matter how well designed they are, and what we can do to prepare for the day when a system in our charge has been pushed beyond what it can normally handle. Lorin Hochstein: lorinhochstein.org Surfing Complexity: surfingcomplexity.blog Software Should Work: softwareshould.work Thank you to our Software Should Work 2026 sponsors: Antithesis: antithesis.com RWX: rwx.com Paytient: paytient.com Redbud VC: redbud.vc ParadeDB: paradedb.comWhy it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an excellent talk on how software systems fail under load and how SREs can prepare for saturation.