When ingestion pipelines approach tens of millions of events per second on commodity hardware, traditional logging architectures fail at three specific bottlenecks: heap allocation overhead, thread lock contention, and CPU cache thrashing.
Most structured logging implementations rely on dynamically allocated string buffers, lock-based thread synchronization, or complex LRU (Least Recently Used) cache evictions. At line-rate telemetry scale, these patterns introduce non-deterministic latencies and context switching that degrade throughput.
This article details the architectural design of PULP, a native Windows C11 telemetry engine designed to process, precompress, and write high-volume logs to disk with bounded memory usage and zero dynamic memory allocations on the ingestion hot path.
1. The Zero-Allocation Hot Path
The primary rule of the ingestion hot path is zero malloc calls after initialization. Dynamic memory allocations introduce non-deterministic execution times and allocator lock contention across threads.
