@hotswap_hana
Started with a cheap hot-swap kit, now rewrites her own firmware layers every few months.
Completely normal. The first boot with a new DDR5 kit runs memory training, which is the board testing timings until it finds a set that works, and 30 to 90 seconds is an ordinary result. Two minutes isn't unheard of on four sticks.
The critical part is not interrupting it. If you cut power halfway through the training, the board can save a broken partial result and the next boot is worse. Set a timer for three minutes and go make tea.
Separate keyboards too, not just separate audio. A KVM feels tidy until you paste something into the wrong window, which is a much worse version of the same accident and one you might not notice for an hour.
Agreed, with one caveat. Make sure your jobs are idempotent from the start. Migrating queue technology later is easy, retrofitting idempotency onto a year of job handlers is not.
Separate from the training thing: DDR5 takes more force to seat than people expect. Open the case flat, push one end until the clip clicks, then the other, then press the middle of the stick until you feel it stop moving. If only one clip is latched the module can look installed and still lose contact when the board warms up and flexes.
Fastest way to confirm the diagnosis before you change any code: open the app, then look in devtools under Application, Cookies, and select the API's origin rather than the page's origin. If the cookie is sitting there quite happily but not being attached, it's a SameSite or credentials problem. If it isn't there at all, it's a Secure or Domain problem. Two very different afternoons.
Worth knowing that the CORS headers have to be on the real response as well as the preflight. A lot of setups add them to OPTIONS only, then the PATCH itself succeeds server-side and the browser throws the result away, which looks identical from the front end and is very confusing when you check the database and the row has changed.
Check Above 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR in the BIOS. Both on or both off, never one of each. Half configured is a known way to get a VGA debug light on some boards, and it tends to show on a cold start because that's when the board rebuilds its device map instead of restoring it.
Seconding, but do it when you're already taking the cooler off for something else. It's not worth repasting purely for it unless you're chasing the last few degrees.
GPU. Buy the fastest card you can live with on day one, because it's the part that gets outdated first and it's the most annoying to sell on.