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RailsConf 2019 - Keeping Throughput High on Green Saturday by Alex Reiff
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This is a sponsored talk by Weedmaps.

Every April, we observe Earth Day and celebrate our planet’s beauty and resources, its oceans and trees. But only days earlier, another kind of tree is celebrated, and Weedmaps experiences its highest traffic of the year. Come see techniques we’ve used recently to lighten the latency on our most requested routes ahead of the elevated demand. Do you cache your API responses but want a lift in your hit ratio? Does that Elasticsearch best practice you know you’re ignoring cause nerves? We’ll pass our solutions to these problems — on the left-hand side.

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The video titled "Keeping Throughput High on Green Saturday," presented by Alex Reiff at RailsConf 2019, focuses on the strategies employed by Weedmaps to maintain high throughput on one of its busiest days, "Green Saturday," which aligns with the cannabis celebration on April 20th. This presentation outlines how lessons learned from previous years' traffic spikes led to systematic improvements in API performance.

**Key Points Discussed:**
- **Overview of Weedmaps:**  The largest technology company dedicated to the cannabis industry, offering various software solutions for different market verticals.
- **Discovery API:**  The core focus of the presentation is the discovery API, which retrieves content for Weedmaps’ website and apps and interfaces with Elasticsearch to provide quick responses. 
- **Traffic Spike on Green Saturday:**  Each year, Weedmaps experiences its highest traffic on April 20th. In 2016, the company's systems struggled under the load, prompting improvements to their infrastructure and process management.
- **Improvements Over the Years:**  Improvements started from splitting database reads/writes to implementing containerization and optimizing Elasticsearch performance, leading up to the 2019 strategy.
- **Micro Caching Implementation:**  Alex introduced micro caching, a technique where web responses are cached for a short period to enhance performance, along with using NGINX for proxy caching.
- **Geolocation Data Handling:**  Focused on optimizing how geolocation data is processed, including discussions on rounding coordinates to reduce request variability and improve caching effectiveness.
- **Caching Strategy Development:**  Developed a caching strategy to replace synchronous queries with background job processing, enhancing user experience.
- **Performance Testing:**  Emphasis on benchmarking and verifying performance changes to catch potential slowdowns before they impact users. 
- **Achievements on Green Saturday 2019:**  On that day, Weedmaps processed 100,000 requests per minute with an average latency of 80 milliseconds and a 9% cache hit rate, demonstrating the effectiveness of their optimizations.

**Conclusions and Takeaways:**
- Efficient caching policy and system architecture lead to improved application performance.
- Optimizing data handling and reducing external requests can significantly enhance user experience during peak loads.
- Continuous testing and post-implementation performance verification are vital to maintaining high throughput.  
Overall, the presentation provides valuable insights into leveraging infrastructure and application optimizations for handling increased user traffic during key business events.

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