Vinted Search Scaling Chapter 9: Billion-Scale Search!
TL;DR: Vinted operates a billion-scale search system - time to reflect and celebrate.
Current state
As of November 11 12:01, 2024, there are 1,000,000,000 documents in the search index. And that number keeps on growing!
Figure 1: Searchable documents count
When I joined the Vinted search team in late 2019 there were about 100M searchable documents. An order of magnitude growth in absolute numbers in just 5 years!
This significant event of leaping into the billion-scale was surprisingly uneventful. The diagrams below show that the search systems CPU utilization is low and under control while it correlates with the incoming number of requests per second. All in all, systems run smoothly without breaking a sweat.
Figure 2: Vespa Search node CPU utilization
Figure 3: Requests per second (RPS)
With a constant stream of search requests of various types coming in, our search engine, Vespa maintains mean latencies well below 20 milliseconds in the data layer.
Figure 4: Mean query latency
Thus, the efforts to migrate search engine from Elasticsearch to Vespa have already paid dividends. According to our internal benchmarking, the current setup could serve the same requests even if we doubled the number of searchable documents without any changes.
Future
Even though the current search system gets the job done by searching through mountains of documents our ambitions are bigger. We are constantly working on improving the search system so that each member query is served with the best deals. At the same time, cool new features such as adding semantic (a.k.a. vector) search, reverse image search, etc. are being worked out. Initial testing looks promising and we can’t wait to release them to our members.
At the same time, Vinted has set ambitious business goals to rapidly expand in terms of both: geography and content verticals. This will stretch our search technology to its limits. However, the search team is confident and excited about those future challenges because of our solid engineering foundations.
With all that said, kudos to the team for constantly shipping mountains of great work! We are certain that this is not the last chapter in the Vinted Search Scaling story. Stay tuned!