Performance @Scale 2020: Optimizing the Instagram Web Tier

Instagram is one of the largest Python deployments which supports billions of people using the service. As the system and features keep growing, so has our compute footprint. This was even more evident this year when global lockdowns caused an unexpected growth in traffic, slowly pushing our physical resources towards their limits. This talk will guide you through various optimizations that helped us stay ahead of the curve. From dealing with excessive memory page faults to python concurrency, we’ll take a deep dive into how Instagram has contained, addressed, and turned around our infrastructure efficiency.