This was a nostalgic pleasure to read in contrast to all the AI implications and tools posts. That said about AI, this as a case study would make an interesting benchmark.

Especially noted that the root cause here was flagged because somebody else had blogged about it. Our "digital commons" should be valued as other than an externality.

I know this is a hopelessly naive question but what is Pinterest even doing with all this AI training?

Interesting story.

I don't know anything about the Linux scheduler, but if one core out of 96 is busy chasing after those ghost allocations, why would a network thread not use one of the other 95 cores, and instead be stuck for seconds? Unless that one core is blocking the entire kernel, but then that would be a lot more visible instantly.

Jeez. Surely the ECS agent could just query for permission to join a cluster, and disable if disallowed?