How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
engineering.shopify.com
How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
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Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#2Is the new implementation still Rails?
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#3Is the new implementation still Rails?
That’s also my question after reading this post. When trying to shave off milliseconds by going for a full rewrite, moving away from ruby seems like an obvious decision...at least intuitively..
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#4Is the new implementation still Rails?
At least it's still Ruby. They wrote how they had to write non-idiomatic Ruby code to get better performance.
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#5Is the new implementation still Rails?
No, it's still Ruby but built directly on top of Rack.
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#6Is the new implementation still Rails?
I'm assuming the details of exactly what the new implementation is have been deliberately withheld for some future post where they talk specifics (especially if it's something exciting like Rust/Elixir/Go). This keeps the focus of this post on the approach to migration, using the old implementation as a reference in order to burn down the list of divergences, etc.
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#7tldr: rewrote the backend focusing on speed
Which is good. At Reddit they would have tried to rewrite everything on reasonML and then tried to prove at the end that it is now faster
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#8Is the new implementation still Rails?
That’s also my question after reading this post. When trying to shave off milliseconds by going for a full rewrite, moving away from ruby seems like an obvious decision...at least intuitively..
Their monolith was written in Rails so Ruby alone was not the source of slow performance. In fact the solution was more to do with cloning the database in order to be able to isolate reads and writes so not even a programming language problem at all.
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#9I wish the article detailed the performance issues with the old implementation, and why those issues necessitated a rewrite (other than "strong primitives" and "difficult to retrofit").
Re: How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite
#10The performance related bits:
- Handcrafted SQL.
- Reduce memory usage, e.g. use mutable map.
- Aggressive caching with layers of caches, DB result cache, app level object cache, and HTTP cache. Some DB queries are partitioned and each partitioned result is cached in key-value store.