Case Study: Video Transcode Latency Spike

A pipeline latency incident caused by profile mismatch and queue saturation, with mitigation strategy.

video performance

Signal

Processing latency increased sharply under normal traffic, and queue depth trended upward without corresponding traffic growth.

Root Cause

New output profile defaults increased encoder workload for mid-size inputs, saturating worker CPU and causing cascading queue delay.

Fix

  • Split profiles by input characteristics and target use case.
  • Apply bounded concurrency per profile class.
  • Introduce queue-aware rate controls and fallback profile selection.

Regression Guard

Added profile-specific benchmark gates with latency and CPU budgets; deployments fail on budget regression.

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