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Making Shopify’s Flagship App 20% Faster in 6 Weeks Using a Novel Caching Solution

shopify.engineering · 1,805 words · saved by 1 readers

Shop is Shopify’s flagship shopping app. It lets anyone track their packages, find new products, and even plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from their purchases. Since launching in 2019, we’ve quickly grown to serve tens of millions of users. One of the most heavily used features of the app is the home page. It’s the first thing users see when they open Shop. The home page keeps track of people’s orders from the time they click the checkout button to when it’s delivered to their door. This feature brings so much value to our users, but we’ve had some technical challenges scaling this globally. As a result of Shop’s growth, the home feed was taking up a significant amount of our total database load, and was starting to have a user-facing impact. We prototyped a few solutions to fix this load issue and ended up building a custom write-through cache for the home feed. This was a huge success—after about six weeks of engineering work, we built a custom caching solution that reduce

blog | Mobile Making Shopify’s Flagship App 20% Faster in 6 Weeks Using a Novel Caching Solution We built a custom write-through cache for the Shop app's home feed that reduced database load by 15% and overall app latency by about 20%. Published on Sep 22, 2021 Shop is Shopify’s flagship shopping app. It lets anyone track their packages, find new products, and even plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from their purchases . Since launching in 2019, we’ve quickly grown to serve tens of millions of users. One of the most heavily used features of the app is the home page. It’s the first thi

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