Programming

Static Analysis at Scale: An Instagram Story

How Instagram develops and uses linting and codemod tools…

Adaptive process and memory management for Python web servers

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…

Handling Growth with Postgres: 5 Tips From Instagram

As we’ve scaled Instagram to an ever-growing number of active users, Postgres has continued to be our solid foundation and the canonical data storage for most of the data created by our users. While less than a year ago, we blogged about…

Storing hundreds of millions of simple key-value pairs in Redis

When transitioning systems, sometimes you have to build a little scaffolding. At Instagram, we recently had to do just that: for legacy reasons, we need to keep around a mapping of about 300 million photos back to the…

Emojineering Part II: Implementing Hashtag Emoji

Today’s post is a continuation of Part 1 on emoji semantics.

🙀🔝Last week, Instagram began supporting emoji characters inside of hashtags. On Friday we talked about the rise in emoji usage on Instagram and how to…