Engineering and company blog from Algolia, the search API provider, on infrastructure, latency, culture and developer tooling.
HN commenters call its posts good, especially those on search latency, bare metal infrastructure, scaling and building a culture around ownership.
Algolia has done some terrific work on search latency (and written about it which is awesome https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-reduces-latency-for-21b-searches-per-month-3959dc926f0).
I think ES can get there, but depends a lot on what hardware you deploy (SSDs!), how you build your index, and whether you can geographically distribute your search engine close to your users.
We have one ES cluster with hundreds of queries per second that gives median 9ms response times and 99th percentile around 160ms. Another cluster with 100x more data that gets 20-25ms median response times and 99th percentile at 360ms.
Now both of these are just the ES response time, there is additional overhead in responding to an API request and then you also start to get into where your data centers are located relative to the end users.
More (slightly out of date) background on our config: https://data.blog/2016/05/03/state-of-wordpress-com-elasticsearch-systems-2016/
.com/net/org are also faster, especially internationally, because of more infrastructure. Algolia found the same during their testing [1].
Use the main TLDs for serving traffic and .io/* for corporate/marketing sites or webapps if the occasional outage isn't a major problem.
1. https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-c1536c46f3a5
Would be interesting to see the story of how you guys started from square one and built out your bare metal infrastructure.
Really love the docsearch project btw, great UX.
EDIT: Just found this blog post right after posting this comment https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-c1536c46f3a5
Congratulations!
Algolia wrote some good blog posts, for example:
https://stories.algolia.com/how-the-founders-of-algolia-think-about-scale-and-how-you-can-too-291a937d119e
https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-built-a-culture-first-company-around-ownership-eee6623b1b6