Temporal Signals for Automated Coordination: Locking, Blocking, and Cross-Workflow Communication

Temporal Signals for Automated Coordination#

In Temporal Signals for Manual Interaction, you learned how external systems and humans send signals to running workflows. Signals are not limited to human input. They are a general-purpose communication channel between workflows, and they become powerful coordination primitives when workflows signal each other programmatically.

This article covers automated signal patterns: cross-workflow signaling, distributed mutexes built on signals, blocking semantics, and the anti-patterns that will burn you.

Database Performance Investigation Runbook

Database Performance Investigation Runbook#

When a database is slow, resist the urge to immediately tune configuration parameters. Follow this sequence: identify what is slow, understand why, then fix the specific bottleneck. Most performance problems are caused by missing indexes or a single bad query, not global configuration issues.

Phase 1 – Identify Slow Queries#

The first step is always finding which queries are consuming the most time.

PostgreSQL: pg_stat_statements#

Enable the extension if not already loaded:

Terraform State Management Patterns

Why Remote State#

Terraform stores the mapping between your configuration and real infrastructure in a state file. By default this is a local terraform.tfstate file. That breaks the moment a second person or a CI pipeline needs to run terraform apply. Remote state solves three problems: team collaboration (everyone reads the same state), CI/CD access (pipelines need state without copying files), and disaster recovery (your laptop dying should not lose your infrastructure mapping).