[jackkinsella]

Going from 12GB to 5MB of memory consumption could probably have been achieved through moving the alerting components to a dedicated Ruby (non-Rails) / Linux script configured to read their queue.

Time taken: 1-2 days.

Their high memory consumption was caused by large numbers of unneeded dependencies (e.g. Rails) included in their alerting components. By refactoring so drastically into a separate Go service, they may have squandered tens of thousands of dollars of company/investor money in retooling, retraining and learning a new environment. Good for the programmers, toxic for the company.