Personally I think child processes are the right approach for this. Launch a new process* for each query and it can (if you choose to go that route) dynamically load in compiled code. Exit when you’re done, and the dynamically loaded code is gone. A side benefit of that is memory leaks are contained, since all memory you allocate is about to be removed anyway.

I’d probably be fine with hundreds or thousands of these hanging in memory. I suspect the generated code for a single query would be in hundreds of kilobytes, maybe a megabyte. But yeah, this is one of those technical details I’d worry about.

Honestly, I wonder if you could just use an actual HTTP server for this? They can handle hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous requests. They can handle requests that complete in a fraction of a millisecond or ones that run for several hours. And they have good tools to catch/deal with code that segfaults, hits an endless loop, attempts to allocate terabytes of swap, etc. HTTP also has wonderful tools to load balance across multiple servers if you do need to scale to massive numbers of requests.

Not sure how a HTTP server would solve the CPU bottleneck of scanning terabytes of data per query?

I somehow didn’t think a regular JIT solution might be applicable here, but it is. Thank you! There seems to be a number of projects doing JIT for C++, will look at them.

This plea for help is specifically for non-coding, but still deeply technical work.

Will they keep the dense email list view as an option? Seeing more than the 14 email messages visible on the screenshot in the post is useful to sort out large folders.

We found that flakiness of e2e tests is usually caused by using libraries, frameworks and devops tools that were not designed for being integrated in e2e tests. So we try to get rid of them, or at least wrap them with devops magic. This requires a skilled devops team and buy-in from management.

At some point we were also solving the issue by having dedicated human reviews of e2e failures, it’s easy to train a junior QA engineer to have most false positives quickly retried.

But we would never give up on e2e.