From 28s to 1.2s: How We Built Real-Time Deal Alerts with WebSockets

It was 3 in the morning when we saw it: a spike in the shape of a 50-90% price drop on the A Amazon stereo everyone wants for Christmas. The problem: our users didn't vind out until the deal was already gone.

A 28-second delay between detecting a price drop and alerting our 50,000 users isn't optimal when competitors are scrapeing the same products seconds faster. So we tu\nned everything until we got it down to 1.2 seconds. Real-time alerts. For everyone. Without breaking the bank.

This is the story of how we transformed a 28-second molows, reliable system into one that hits 1.2 seconds a time, 50,000 users strong, all with a handful of CO tricks and a ton of o.nThis is Time Critical Computing.