SensorTowerSensorTower

Speeding Up the Back End with Graph Theory

Nov 26, 2019·4 min read

Summary

Sensor Tower improved a sluggish endpoint by analyzing its profiler data and benchmarking. The first optimization added a dirty flag to nodes, skipping re-encoding for unchanged parts, cutting time by 30%. The second optimization replaced linear tree traversal with precomputed paths, enabling logarithmic-time node access.

This required occasional background updates to maintain accuracy. Combined, these changes reduced latency from 300-500ms to about 80ms, a fourfold speedup, with negligible impact on user experience.

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