---
title: "Performance"
description: "817 posts about Performance, summarised, each linking to the original."
---

# Performance
> 817 posts about Performance, summarised, each linking to the original.

## Articles

### [Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector](https://yomu.fyi/post/storing-openai-embeddings-in-postgres-with-pgvector.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: gregnr
- Published: Feb 6, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

Post describes how embeddings represent semantic relatedness as vectors and how OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 model produces 1536-dimensional embeddings for text. It addresses storing and searching large or dynamically changing collections that may not fit comfortably in memory, using PostgreSQL and the pgvector extension instead of a small CSV-and-NumPy workflow. The implementation enables the vector extension, creates a documents table with a vector(1536) column, and defines match\_documents() with cosine distance, thresholds, counts, and ordering. It also shows JavaScript code for generating embeddings, a search flow that retrieves matching documents for prompt context, and token limiting before a completion request, while noting that documents can be chunked. For larger tables, the post recommends an ivfflat index with vector\_cosine\_ops and gives 4 \* sqrt(table\_rows) as a starting point for lists.


### [Performance Testing At Scale—for BFCM and Beyond](https://yomu.fyi/post/performance-testing-at-scale-for-bfcm-and-beyond.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 27, 2023
- Type: Benchmark

Shopify treats Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) as its most critical period, and uses full-scale BFCM Scale Testing to assess whether the platform can handle peak traffic. Preparation combines capacity planning, resiliency testing, single-application performance testing, and repeated exercises that scale core services to their BFCM profiles before generating load. The hybrid architecture centers on Shopify Core, a monolithic Ruby application supported by services for storefront rendering, analytics, fraud analysis, payments, webhooks, and more. Five load flows cover browsing and buying, admin activity, flash sales, Storefront APIs, and Hydrogen and Oxygen, with Cronograma layering requests gradually and providing an abort switch. The exercises surfaced connection-count pressures, a Kubernetes ingress-nginx endpoint limit, and uneven load-balancer distribution; mitigations included refactoring, scaling dependent services, increasing pod capacity, and dedicated nginx node pools.


### [Making Your React Native Gestures Feel Natural](https://yomu.fyi/post/making-your-react-native-gestures-feel-natural.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 20, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

The post describes techniques for making draggable elements in a React Native Sheet component feel more natural during open-and-close gestures. A gesture handler updates yPosition as the user’s finger moves, then chooses an open or closed destination when the drag ends, but a position-only decision can ignore a fast flick and a fixed 600 ms animation ignores distance. The revised interaction adds event.velocityY, weighted by a multiplier, to the destination decision and uses withSpring so distance and release velocity affect the animation. It also divides overdrag distance when the Sheet is already open, creating resistance that communicates the boundary, and reports that flicks become easier while movement feels more realistic; the examples are ultimately recommended for testing on a real device.


### [Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready](https://yomu.fyi/post/ruby-3-2-s-yjit-is-production-ready.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 17, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Ruby 3.2 makes YJIT, Shopify’s just-in-time compiler for CRuby, substantially more suitable for production after its experimental Ruby 3.1 release. The project was ported from C99 to Rust for stronger safety guarantees and better abstractions, while memory work reduced overhead to approximately one third of the Ruby 3.1 level through metadata optimization, machine-code garbage collection, and lazy page allocation. YJIT 3.2 speeds railsbench by about 38% over the Ruby 3.2 interpreter, or 57% over the Ruby 3.1.3 interpreter, and adds native ARM64 support for Apple M1/M2, AWS Graviton, and Raspberry Pi. Shopify has deployed it across its Storefront Renderer infrastructure, measuring real-world speedups of 5% to 10%, while identifying memory footprint and method-call optimization as continuing priorities.


### [React Native Skia: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead](https://yomu.fyi/post/react-native-skia-a-year-in-review-and-a-look-ahead.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 29, 2022
- Type: Explainer

React Native Skia’s first year produced an initial alpha and 89 additional releases, evolving a React Renderer and Skia integration for declarative 2D graphics across iOS, Android, the Web, and Node.js testing. The project changed direction after identifying two bottlenecks: dependence on the JavaScript thread and the overhead of thousands of JSI allocations in large drawings. Skia DOM addresses them with a declarative drawing state that recomputes only necessary changes and executes drawings on the UI thread, with C++ implementations on iOS and Android and a JavaScript implementation on React Native Web. CanvasKit compatibility, Expo integration, Metal on iOS, and OpenGL on Android and the Web support the cross-platform design, while extension points enable modules such as Skottie and camera-frame effects. The library’s tests compare rendered examples across platforms, and planned work includes JavaScript-worklet and Reanimated animation integration plus advanced text layouts through Skia’s paragraph module.


### [Optimizing Ruby’s Memory Layout: Variable Width Allocation](https://yomu.fyi/post/optimizing-ruby-s-memory-layout-variable-width-allocation.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 25, 2022
- Type: Explainer

CRuby’s original garbage collector stores most Ruby objects in fixed 40-byte RVALUE slots, leaving differently sized data partly unused or forcing additional allocations through malloc. Shopify’s Variable Width Allocation project adds dynamic-sized allocation APIs and five fixed-size pools—40, 80, 160, 320, and 640 bytes—while increasing heap pages from 16 KB to 64 KB. The design targets cache locality, malloc overhead, memory utilization, and future garbage-collector experimentation; a new GC.stat\_heap API reports size-pool statistics, and an escape hatch can disable the feature at build time on Ruby 3.2. Benchmarks on development Ruby 3.2.0 showed gains in most workloads, including 9.8% for psych-load, 5.3% for hexapdf, and 2.1% for railsbench, while mail was 1.7% slower.


### [Year in Review 2022: Tenderlove's Ruby and Rails Reflections and Predictions](https://yomu.fyi/post/year-in-review-2022-tenderlove-s-ruby-and-rails-reflections-and-predic.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 22, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Aaron Patterson’s 2022 review surveys developments in Ruby and Rails, pairing runtime performance work with tools intended to improve developer productivity. YJIT’s compiler was rewritten in Rust, enabling ARM and Apple Silicon support while producing faster machine code; Variable Width Allocation adjusts object slot sizes to keep instance variables embedded and improve data locality. Ruby 3.2’s Object Shapes use property order as a class-independent inline-cache key, while Ruby LSP adds editor services and Error Highlight adds column-level diagnostics that now appear on Rails error pages. Patterson predicts—more accurately, hopes—that languages, frameworks, and development environments will become more interconnected, providing better suggestions, context, and assistance so developers can spend less time coding and more time solving problems.


### [What's new in Postgres 15?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-s-new-in-postgres-15.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: pavel
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Explainer

PostgreSQL 15, released as a stable version in October 2022, adds security, performance, SQL, replication, logging, compression, and string-processing changes. CREATE permission is revoked from all users except the database owner, views can use caller permissions with security\_invoker=on, and sorting is reported up to four times faster for in-memory and on-disk workloads; window functions also improve. The release introduces MERGE, supports two-phase commits and selective data in logical replication, allows conflicting transactions to be skipped or subscriptions disabled, and enables parallel workers for SELECT DISTINCT. It also adds JSON logging, Zstandard and ZL4 compression for WAL and pg\_basebackup, and POSIX regexp functions such as regexp\_substr() and regexp\_count(). The post recommends upgrading for bug fixes and stability, while noting that migrated databases may need manual permission changes and upgrades should be checked for rare manual actions.


### [pg\_graphql v1.0](https://yomu.fyi/post/pg-graphql-v1-0.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: oli\_rice
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

pg\_graphql 1.0 marks the general availability of a PostgreSQL extension that lets databases be queried with GraphQL and formalizes a SemVer-based guarantee against backward-incompatible changes. It was designed for Supabase Free Plan servers with 1 GB of memory, where alternatives such as Hasura and Graphile consumed more memory than the platform could sacrifice. The implementation began with a C parser and SQL transpiler exposed through PostgREST RPC, then moved from SQL to Rust after nested SQL functions, copied state, and JSONB AST processing slowed schema introspection; v0.5.0 completed the rewrite. On Free Plan hardware, version 1.0 adds less than 300 microseconds per request, reaches about 1,060 SQL queries per second per connection, and the full Auth and HTTP stack handles about 645 requests per second, while larger instances exceed 10,000 requests per second.


### [Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-embraces-rust-for-systems-programming.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 14, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Shopify has adopted Rust as its official systems programming language while retaining Ruby for server-side business logic, and has joined the Rust Foundation. The change addresses growing systems-programming needs including high-performance network servers, Ruby native extensions, and WebAssembly, where Shopify seeks speed, productivity, safety, and community-driven open source. Shopify cites Rust’s predictable native-code performance, fine-grained memory control, compile-time safety, support for concurrency, and interoperability with C and Ruby through tools and crates such as bindgen, rb-sys, and magnus. The company says Rust performed strongly in its safety evaluation and that its initial projects exposed more errors at compile time, while acknowledging that performance still depends on design and measurement and that internal education, tooling, and community participation remain unfinished work.


### [Supabase Storage v2: Image resizing and Smart CDN](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-storage-v2-image-resizing-and-smart-cdn.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: fabrizio,inian
- Published: Dec 13, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase Storage introduces image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN, positioning them as components of an on-demand image delivery system. Resizing uses imgproxy and supports width, height, and contain, cover, or fill modes through JavaScript clients or direct Storage API requests; images are not enlarged beyond their original dimensions, and aspect ratio is preserved by default. The Smart CDN stores resized results using cache keys based on an Etag, tenant ID, bucket, and image name, while webhook-driven metadata updates propagate invalidations globally within about 60 seconds. Image Resizing is beta for Pro and Enterprise customers, with 100 transformed images per project at no additional cost and $5 per additional 1,000; self-hosting is free.


### [3 (More) Tips for Optimizing Apache Flink Applications](https://yomu.fyi/post/3-more-tips-for-optimizing-apache-flink-applications.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 13, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Shopify presents three additional practices for optimizing large stateful Apache Flink applications, focusing on parallelism, sink capacity, and combining heterogeneous sources. It recommends starting with execution-environment parallelism, then matching task-manager capacity to the highest parallelism value; for example, parallelism 100 requires 25 task managers with four slots each. Sink bottlenecks can propagate backpressure upstream, so batching writes and correcting data skew—including with key bucketing when a low-cardinality or uneven key is unavoidable—can improve distribution, though bucketed results must later be combined. For archived Kafka topics, HybridSource exposes cloud-storage history and the live Kafka topic as one ordered logical DataStream, automatically switching after the archive is exhausted and using object-storage partitions to accelerate historical backfills.


### [pg\_crdt - an experimental CRDT extension for Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/post/pg-crdt-an-experimental-crdt-extension-for-postgres.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: paul\_copplestone
- Published: Dec 10, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announces pg\_crdt, an experimental Postgres extension that adds CRDT support as a data type for collaborative and offline-oriented applications. It frames CRDTs as structures whose updates can be merged in any order to reach the same final state, avoiding the last-write-wins behavior of ordinary arrays. A content column can use crdt.ydoc, backed by Yjs, while the extension also supports Automerge through Rust libraries wrapped with pgx. The post contrasts storing CRDTs directly in Postgres with making Realtime an authoritative server, favoring the database-centered approach for simpler architecture and broader tooling, while noting that the decision is unsettled and pg\_crdt is not released on the Supabase platform. Known limitations include full-document WAL broadcasts, increased WAL and dead tuples for frequently updated documents, and serialization overhead for large CRDT values.


### [Who We Hire at Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/post/who-we-hire-at-supabase.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: ant\_wilson
- Published: Dec 9, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Supabase describes the hiring traits and operating model it believes support its growth, arguing that people matter more than methodology. It looks for extreme asynchronous effectiveness, egoless execution, continuous incremental improvement, a bias toward immediate action, ambitious problem-solving, and a founder mindset; seniority does not exempt anyone from independent-contributor work, self-management, or maintenance. The 60-person team spans 25 countries, uses meetings as a last resort, and gives autonomous product teams access to shared metrics, user feedback, and equity through an ESOP. Teams are organised around products such as Postgres, Auth, Storage, Realtime, and Functions, while cross-cutting groups consult rather than merely receive delegated tasks. Three-month product cycles set ambitious goals, and Kaizen Weeks focused on QA, documentation, and performance help address technical debt and incorporate improvements into ongoing workflows.


### [How KartaCam powers GrabMaps](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-kartacam-powers-grabmaps.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Shuangquan Hou
- Published: Dec 1, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's Geo team required an efficient, low-cost way to collect fresh street-level imagery across Southeast Asia, where professional mapping equipment is prohibitively expensive and smartphone crowdsourcing yields inconsistent quality. To address this, Grab built KartaCam, a custom mapping device equipped with a 12MP sensor, dual-band GNSS, 4G LTE, and onboard edge AI. Edge machine learning models evaluate scene suitability, check image quality, filter for map-relevant objects, and blur personal data directly on the device prior to upload. Deploying a four-camera KartaCam 360 array delivers panoramic coverage and point-of-interest data comparable to commercial mapping rigs at roughly one-twentieth the hardware cost.


### [Using Server Sent Events to Simplify Real-time Streaming at Scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-server-sent-events-to-simplify-real-time-streaming-at-scale.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 30, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify’s 2022 BFCM Live Map needed to deliver real-time sales and product data to thousands of concurrent users while processing data from millions of merchants. Its 2021 architecture used WebSocket delivery to a presentation layer, which stored messages in a mailbox that clients polled at least every 10 seconds, creating latency and bottlenecks. Shopify replaced that path with a streamlined Flink-based pipeline and a Golang SSE server that subscribes to Kafka topics and pushes JSON data to registered, authenticated clients as soon as it is available. The SSE server ran horizontally behind Nginx load balancers, with a configurable Java client used to load-test concurrent connections. The 2022 system maintained 100 percent uptime, delivered SSE data within milliseconds of availability, and visualized data within 21 seconds of creation, including pipeline processing.


### [SQL or NoSQL? Why not use both (with PostgreSQL)?](https://yomu.fyi/post/sql-or-nosql-why-not-use-both-with-postgresql.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: burggraf
- Published: Nov 24, 2022
- Type: Explainer

The post compares SQL and NoSQL storage for an application that records daily food, water, exercise, weight, and notes, focusing on the tension between easy document writes and later analysis. It proposes using PostgreSQL as a hybrid: keep core fields such as date, user\_id, weight, and notes in relational columns, while storing food\_log, water\_log, and exercise\_log as JSONB fields. For analysis, PostgreSQL's jsonb\_array\_elements expands arrays into rows; ->> extracts text, -> returns JSON, and numeric values such as calories must be cast to INTEGER before aggregation, with a common table expression used to work around the restriction on set-returning functions inside aggregate calls. The examples show daily calorie totals and a search for garlic bread returning 200 calories, supporting the conclusion that JSONB can simplify storage while SQL preserves querying and analysis capabilities.


### [Our Solution for Measuring React Native Rendering Times](https://yomu.fyi/post/our-solution-for-measuring-react-native-rendering-times.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 24, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Shopify needed a reliable way to measure React Native rendering times and verify that mobile apps remained as fast as native while adopting React Native. The open-source @shopify/react-native-performance library measures app startup, navigation, and screen re-render times by timing from native startup, a user action, or a UI event until a screen is fully rendered and interactive. It uses an invisible marker view with a native counterpart to capture end-to-end timing, including React Native-to-native bridge communication, and models incremental rendering as interactive or non-interactive render passes in a state machine. Reports can be sent through onReportPrepared to analytics tools such as Amplitude, where percentile TTI dashboards compare screens over time, expose bottlenecks, and help catch regressions; Shopify also uses screen-level Apdex internally.


### [What We Learned from Open-Sourcing FlashList](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-we-learned-from-open-sourcing-flashlist.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 17, 2022
- Type: Explainer

FlashList is Shopify’s React Native list library, created after Shopify’s migration from native technology exposed poor list performance in React Native. The post explains how a four-person team prototyped a library that combined FlatList’s familiar API with RecyclerListView’s performance, while addressing blank spacing and low frame rates on some devices. It also describes a launch planned six months ahead around a landing page, documentation, blog storytelling, social media, conference exposure, and feedback from external users. The post says FlashList was used in production on some Shopify app screens, and the launch achieved 1,000 GitHub stars in less than 24 hours. The broader conclusion is that successful open-source projects require product thinking, user empathy, community building, and a long-term authority-building strategy in addition to code.


### [Apollo Cache is Your Friend, If You Get To Know It](https://yomu.fyi/post/apollo-cache-is-your-friend-if-you-get-to-know-it.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 9, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify’s migration from Apollo GraphQL client 2 to client 3 prompted a closer examination of the Apollo InMemoryCache after past bugs were linked to misunderstanding or misuse. The cache stores an in-memory representation of queried data for the current browser session, and its lifecycle covers fetching, normalization, updating and merging, then garbage collection and eviction. Fetch policies determine whether data comes from the cache, the network, or both; under the default cache-first policy, incomplete data triggers a network request. Normalization breaks responses into objects, assigns cache identifiers usually from \_\_typename and id or configured key fields, and stores them in a flattened structure. Automatic UI updates depend on matching identifiers and suitable query or mutation responses, while objects made unreachable by changed identifiers can remain until garbage collection removes them.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance/page/31.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance/page/33.md)