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MethodJuly 7, 20266 min read
Search beats intuition in configuration space
Expert priors get you to a good region fast. Getting to the optimum inside that region is a search problem.
Priors are a starting point
Experienced systems engineers narrow the space quickly, and that narrowing is valuable. It also stops well short of an optimum, because the interactions between parameters are not separable.
Cheap evaluation changes everything
The bottleneck in configuration search is evaluation cost. Fast, faithful replay of recorded traffic makes thousands of trials affordable, and that is what turns search into a practical method.
Keep humans in the loop on objectives
Search should optimize an objective the team owns: a weighted combination of latency, throughput, cost, and power that reflects actual service commitments.