There's a common Prometheus alert called "NodeMemoryMajorPagesFaults". It's part of the Node Exporter's node-mixin project and also included in the kube-prometheus-stack default alert rules.
But what does this alert mean, and what do you do about it? This article helps you form a good mental model and provides practical guidance.
What's the difference between command and command | cat? There shouldn't be any, right? The first prints the output directly, and the latter prints output via cat, but they should have the same effect. Not so: the latter can cause the command to get stuck indefinitely. This has given a particular CI pipeline of mine quite some headache.
To learn why this happens, and how we can mitigate this problem, we need to dive into the arcane magic that is Unix process management. Join me on this journey.
