performance posts

As I was reading through the Petar Maymounkov and David Mazières paper "Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric", I was interested in the application of this XOR metric on work I had previously done on clustering embeddings. When implementing the Infer API for Clarity Hub, we focused on using the distance between vectors as a way to cluster utterances together into a topic. We did this via Euclidean distance between vectors, which we had to compare against all other vectors within the space.

Every system has its limits. When designing and architecting systems, sometimes we as engineers like to assume things can scale infinitely. Maybe we can use larger machines, or maybe we can deploy more instances of a service. But even trying to scale systems isn't magically infinite. It's a smart move to understand the limitations of what we are building upfront so we can make better technology choices, and squeeze the performance out of our existing systems.

I was working on a project and I noticed the tsc check that we ran on pre-commit hooks had become dramatically slower. I was seeing near instant times to type check the entire project go to agonizingly slow minutes to check the project. I was able to narrow the range of commits to some change we made within a month window. I’m sure I could have narrowed it down by continuing to git bisect and re-running time npx tsc, but it was much easier to just check out main and try out the following:

This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into performance of web applications.