The Tale of Errors in Microservices: Extended Abstract
I-Ting Angelina Lee, Zhizhou Zhang, Abhishek Parwal, Milind Chabbi · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2025
Microservice architectures have become the de facto paradigm for building scalable, service-oriented systems. Although their decentralized design promotes resilience and rapid development, the inherent complexity leads to subtle performance challenges. In particular, non-fatal errors - internal failures of remote procedure calls that do not cause top-level request failures - can accumulate along the critical path, inflating latency and wasting resources. In this work, we analyze over 11 billion RPCs across more than 6,000 microservices at Uber. Our study shows that nearly 29% of successful requests experience non-fatal errors that remain hidden in traditional monitoring. We propose a novel latency-reduction estimator ( LR estimator ) to quantify the potential benefit of eliminating these errors. Our contributions include a systematic study of RPC error patterns, a methodology to estimate latency reductions, and case studies demonstrating up to a 30% reduction in tail latency.