Dismissing Python Garbage Collection at Instagram

By dismissing the Python garbage collection (GC) mechanism, which reclaims memory by collecting and freeing unused data, Instagram can run 10% more efficiently. Yes, you heard it right! By disabling GC, we can reduce the memory footprint and…

Bringing Wide Color to Instagram

Last September, Apple announced the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which include cameras that capture a greater range of colors than previous models, and screens that can display that wider color range. We’ve just finished updating Instagram to support wide color, and since we’re…

Improving performance with background data prefetching

The Instagram community is bigger and more diverse than ever before. 800m people now visit every month, 80% of whom are outside of the United States. As the community grows, it becomes more and more important that our app can withstand…

Copy-on-write friendly Python garbage collection

At Instagram, we have the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. We began using Python early on because of its simplicity, but we’ve had to do many hacks over the years to keep it simple as…

Profiling CPython at Instagram

Instagram employs Python in one of the world’s largest settings, using it to implement the “business logic” needed to serve 800 million monthly active users. We use the reference implementation of Python, known as CPython, as the runtime used to execute our code. As we’ve…

A year of Stories: Launching is the easy part

One year ago today we launched Instagram Stories to the world. We knew we were making a major change to a product that hundreds of millions of people around the world love and use daily. The weight of this responsibility — plus the opportunity to…

App modularization and module lazy loading at Instagram and beyond

Instagram prides itself on having a lean app. But as the number of engineers and features grows, so do the challenges to size. We start to face issues like:

• increase in application size…