Vespa Product Updates, October 2020

In the October 2020 Vespa product update, several advancements were introduced, including new container thread pool configurations and improvements to the document/v1 API throughput. The new configurations allow for live reloading of application changes into the JVM, enhancing feed throughput and minimizing latency during deployments by adjusting the default thread pool size to be proportional to logical CPUs instead of a fixed 500 threads. Optimizations in feed container concurrent execution and asynchronous request handling have boosted the quality of service and increased throughput by 50% for the synchronous HTTP API since Vespa version 7.304.50. Additionally, the previous visibility-delay feature for batching writes was removed due to inefficiencies, with recommendations to discontinue its use. Vespa, developed largely by Yahoo engineers, is an open-source big data processing engine utilized by platforms like Yahoo News and Verizon Media Ad Platform, and it continues to grow with community contributions.