AWS re:Invent is almost here! Meet Charity and get a signed copy of Observability Engineering.Learn more
Blog

Meet the Author

Ian Wilkes

Ian Wilkes

Principal Software Engineer

Go to Team

Ian is a software engineer with 20 years of experience in the field.

Explore Author's Blog

How We Saved 70% of CPU and 60% of Memory in Refinery’s Go Code, No Rust Required.
October 9, 2025

How We Saved 70% of CPU and 60% of Memory in Refinery’s Go Code, No Rust Required

We've just released Refinery 3.0, a performance-focused update which significantly improves Refinery's CPU and memory efficiency.

Sampling
blog_concurrency_thumbnail_v1
September 30, 2021

Understanding Lambda Sleep Cycles With CONCURRENCY

CONCURRENCY is now enabled for all customers. See our docs page for information about how it works and how to use it effectively. Questions or would like to test out CONCURRENCY and Honeycomb? Sign…

Databases
Product Updates
latency by span
March 16, 2021

Event Latency: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Recently, we added a new derived column function to Honeycomb, INGEST_TIMESTAMP(), which can help customers debug event latency and/or inaccurate timestamps. A meaningful minority of the events sent to Honeycomb are already old when…

Databases
Product Updates
From “Secondary Storage” To Just “Storage”: A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection
December 12, 2019

From “Secondary Storage” To Just “Storage”: A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection

When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance. Compared to Honeycomb’s primary NVMe storage attached to dedicated servers, secondary storage let customers keep more data…

Databases
Dogfooding
Product Updates
Software Engineering
image description
November 1, 2018

Speeding Things Up So Your Queries Can Bee Faster

Honeycomb strives to be a fast, efficient tool; our storage back-end satisfies the median customer query in 250ms (and the P90 in 1.3 seconds). Still, every system has its limits, and customers with large…

Databases
Product Updates
grover-near-far
July 10, 2018

There And Back Again: A Honeycomb Tracing Story

In our previous post about Honeycomb Tracing, we used tracing to better understand Honeycomb’s own query path. When doing this kind of investigation, you typically have to go back and forth, zooming out and back…

Databases
Dogfooding
bee-building-blocks
May 23, 2018

Build and Run a Honeycomb Query right from your URL bar with Query Template Links

Whenever you run a Honeycomb query, you’re directed to the permalink for the results. Returning to this URL always supplies the same data without re-running the query, which is important when sharing links to…

Product Updates