TL;DR: Everything works great until it doesn't. I've watched dashboards look perfectly healthy — p50 latency under 50ms, error rate flat — right up until a table crosses 500k rows and suddenly specific endpoints start timing out.

📖 Reading time: ~45 min

What's in this article

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The Moment You Know You Have a Query Problem

Everything works great until it doesn't. I've watched dashboards look perfectly healthy — p50 latency under 50ms, error rate flat — right up until a table crosses 500k rows and suddenly specific endpoints start timing out. The failure mode is never gradual.…