How we reduced initialisation time of Product Configuration Management SDK

Summary

GrabX, Grab’s central product configuration management platform, provides an SDK whose eventually consistent updates take about a minute to reach clients, but initialisation took roughly four minutes for services loading around 400 MB. The SDK’s sequential workflow downloaded subscribed-service and common data from AWS S3 to disk and memory before initialising dependent modules, creating cold-start pressure and possible throttling when new instances were launched. Phase 1 made the two data loads concurrent, reducing initialisation time by approximately 80%, while Phase 2 concurrently downloaded and loaded large configurations within a subscribed service, adding a further approximate 6% reduction. Phase 3 removed disk persistence because its stale-data fallback conflicted with most clients’ need for current data, allowing failed connections to trigger client action such as retrying. Benchmarks across services with varied data sizes indicated reductions of up to 90%.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Concurrent loading of subscribed-service and common data reduced SDK initialisation time by approximately 80%.

2. 2

   Concurrent download and in-memory loading of large configurations within a subscribed service produced a further approximate 6% reduction.

3. 3

   Removing disk persistence eliminated a fallback path that could serve outdated configuration data and contributed to an overall measured reduction of up to 90%.