site speed: go from fast to instant

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What problem are you trying to solve / opportunity you're addressing?

site speed: go from 'fast' to instant and remove long delays when the
search misses the cache (memcache).

Describe the rough idea:

Latency is a holistic problem, and you have to attack all the major
factors at once.  I believe them to be:
(1) Replace Base with something more capable, which in turn reduces the
burden on appengine-- drive down cache misses from 3000+ msec to 1000msec
or less-- part of 1a.
(2) to the extent we need to implement a "mixer" for reranking, make the
backend search calls in parallel and not sequentially.
(3) Implement CSS sprites to reduce the cost of the little images.
(4) make search pages cacheable and switch to Analytics-style post-load
reporting; this also subsumes mblain's good suggestion of using batch calls
for the CTR computation.

Does this require anything beyond writing code?

nope.

In the 18 month timeframe, how much impact could this have (number of
people impacted)?  have you considered all the steps involved (e.g.
approvals, user signups, etc.) and whether they would slow us or limit
scale?

TBD-- latency is everybody's favorite feature.

Can this be implemented in 3 months or less?

yes-- couple of weeks at most in fact.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by adam.sah on 24 Jun 2009 at 3:24

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Original comment by adam.sah on 24 Jun 2009 at 3:26

• Added labels: Type-FeatureRequest

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Original comment by adam.sah on 25 Jun 2009 at 6:01

• Added labels: GoodStarterOr20PctProject

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Original comment by adam.sah on 28 Jun 2009 at 4:26

• Added labels: Milestone-Roadmap